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Copyright © 1998 by Mike McMillan. Not to be reproduced for profit without the permission of the author.
Oh, that thou shouldst give dust a tongue
To cry to thee,
And then not hear it crying! All day long
My heart was in my knee,
But no hearing.- George Herbert, 'Denial' from The Temple, 1633.
George Herbert is one of my favourite poets, not least because he can express things that I've felt far better than I can. His meditation on unanswered prayer, part of which I just quoted, expresses the frustration many of us feel when (to use a present-day metaphor) we try to browse God and get a "URL 404 not found" error.
Let me tell you rather a sad story. When I was young and foolish (that is, younger and more foolish than I am now), I fell in love - which is a common occupation of young fools. I was not only young and foolish, but also a devout believer in the power of prayer; and I prayed, every day for a year, twelve prayers.
After a long search through my files, I located the envelope on the back of which those twelve prayers were written. One was that I would be able to treat the young woman concerned as a sister, with absolute purity (1 Timothy 5:2), in heart, mind, word and action. Another was that I would be able to enjoy our friendship as a friendship. Another was that our hearts would be turned to the same attitude. A fourth was that my feelings for her would be taken away. But one I remembered distinctly, even before I found the paper. I knew she had been hurt by men in the past, and (not really wanting to pray this, but knowing that I should), I made my last petition, each day, that if it would be better so, God would provide her with someone else, other than me, who would be a good husband for her and help her heal her hurts.
Guess which one of my twelve prayers was the only one - the only one - to be answered (or so I thought, until I found the paper; I'll mention the other later on) . I meant every one of those prayers, except that one. And within a few months of her final, definitive and clear refusal of me (as contrasted with her earlier unclear refusal, which had me confused and on tenterhooks for eight excruciating months), she was going out with someone else, whom she subsequently married. I have that list of prayers in front of me as I write. In large capital letters at the bottom, I have written "No."
Before this time, I was the most praying man I knew. I was the Incredible Human Prayer Wheel. I can say that without pride; the man who prayed every day through long lists of friends, acquaintances, foreign countries, missionaries and issues died in the disastrous fires of which my romantic disappointment was only one. I inherited his body, his name, his books and his memories (and his debts). But afterwards, I gradually prayed less and less, and for a couple of years didn't pray at all. Why not?
Even though I was young and foolish (though a sadder and a wiser man for my experiences), I don't think it was just the immature reaction "God, you didn't give me what I wanted, I'm not talking to you any more." There was more to it than that (though that may have come into it; who knows their own heart fully, after all?). Primarily, I was disillusioned and confused about the whole idea of prayer.
After all, I had bought a bill of goods on prayer. I'd read E.M. Bounds and Operation World and three or four other books (and believe me, books on prayer can be pretty dry, and there's not a lot you can say); had (still have, in fact) a collection of articles on prayer; and had taken part in prayer seminars and attended numberless prayer meetings. I belonged to prayer organisations (their newsletters were among the fodder for my morning intercessions). I had organised a 24-hour prayer chain for an evangelistic event (filled in all the slots that nobody else took, getting up twice in the night as a result, and later walked seven times around the venue in the pouring rain - and finished triumphantly by losing my temper with my best friend because he had "broken" the chain through not taking it seriously). I had invented a new way of organising prayer in small groups, and in general was seen as Mr Prayer in the Christian group of which I was part. I had prayed every day for a year (and that just has to be worth points, doesn't it?), fervently, sincerely, trustingly (well, mostly trustingly), good prayers, pious prayers, self-denying prayers - and that goes a long way beyond persistent neighbours asking for a loaf of bread or persistent widows bothering unjust judges. According to everything I'd been taught, I should have had my prayers answered. And I hadn't. What was wrong?
Well, of course I'd had one prayer answered, but of all the prayers I'd ever prayed it was the one I'd least wanted to have answered. I only put it in because I thought it was right to do so.
I found myself questioning the value of petitionary prayer. If God, in his wisdom and sovereignty, had already decided what he was going to do, what was the point in my asking anything at all? After all, if he was going to do it, he'd do it, and if he wasn't, he wouldn't, regardless of whether I prayed or not. A lot of prayers are phrased as if we're giving God advice - and a lot of it is bad advice, and I'm glad that he ignores it. But why give it in the first place?
And then, a number of my petitions had, in effect, asked him to change someone else's mind, to interfere with their will. A suspicion crept up on me that maybe he didn't do that. (I had always favoured free will over predestination.) And if you leave out prayers that would involve God interfering with the will of man, you don't have a great deal left. You don't even have a lot of biblical prayers left - not that I thought that unthinkable thought. (It wasn't until years later that I began to realise how subtle his influence on our wills can be.)
And then there was the way Christians used prayer. If someone is asked to do something in a secular context and either wants to have time to figure out a way out of it or doesn't want to seem too eager, they say, "Let me think about it and I'll get back to you." In a Christian context, this becomes "Let me pray about it and I'll get back to you." Were Christians substituting prayer for thought? Or was praying just a falsely spiritualised way of thinking through issues?
And then there were the times Christians prayed for God to do something instead of doing something entirely obvious to fix the problem themselves. While flicking through my old file on prayer to write this article, I came across a quotation which I had carefully copied onto a piece of paper and probably stuck on my wall (under my prayer map):
"Our problem is not that we pray too much and never do any work. Quite the opposite..."
- Dan Hayes
Underneath it, in a moment of disillusionment, I had later scrawled in pencil:
Balls.
- Mike McMillan.
A friend, who worked in the office of a Christian organisation, mentioned how the response there to an accounting problem was to "pray for the blood over it" rather than to set to and work out what was causing it and fix it. We began to talk about doing a study on prayer, looking through biblical examples and trying to determine in which order thought, action and prayer had typically taken place. But we never got around to it. Perhaps it wasn't important enough to us (though we were busy). Prayer faded gradually into the background. It just became something I didn't do.
Eventually, I did start to pray again. What explicitly triggered it off was a sermon by a pastor who had also had his struggles with prayer. He didn't say anything particularly new (that I remember), but he demonstrated an attitude: I'm not sure how prayer works, I'm not even sure if prayer works. But I'm going to pray anyway, because the Bible says to, and it doesn't say anything without a reason.
At the same time, I had been gradually recovering from my hurt and disillusionment and gaining more perspective on what had happened. I met the woman who had turned me down again, and the man she had subsequently accepted (who had been a friend of mine), and after something of a struggle was reconciled to them. I also watched them interacting, which is always an interesting thing to do in these cases. They moved out of town; we lost touch; more years went by. And the other day I wrote to a friend about the woman:
...in retrospect she was a moderately intelligent, not particularly good-looking, fairly ordinary sort of person who was completely, and I mean completely, unsuited to me.
I've thanked God a number of times that she had enough sense to turn me down (looking back, it seems I didn't have enough sense to come in out of the rain - literally, in view of my prayer walk around the evangelism venue). Because I might have been happy then if we'd married; but I know I'd be unhappy now. It seems that God knew best after all. What a surprise.
I've just read Letters from a Solo Survivor, by Kathy Keay, and what she says is true: "Believe that the Given Good, i.e. what we have, is better than the Expected Good, i.e. what we would like". As I said, when I located that old envelope with the prayers scrawled on it, I discovered that I had had two prayers answered. Written down there with the others was the old standby: "God's name glorified, his plans and purpose fulfilled". It's a cliché. But it's a cliché because it's such a part of how life is.
So, have I answered my questions about prayer? Not really. But I pray, because I recognise prayer as more than a mechanical exercise of dry principles to get what I want. Prayer, for me, is a way of orienting myself to God, of preparing myself for the sometimes frightening and painful times when he gives me what I need. It's summed up in two great verses, often quoted, which I now understand slightly differently from the way I took them in my foolish youth:
Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.
- Philippians 4:6
and:
Cast all your anxiety upon him, because he cares for you.
- 1 Peter 5:7
I don't always get what I want. When I do, it comes as a pleasant surprise; and even then, it often happens in a way I hadn't envisaged. These days, a lot of what my prayer does in effect is say to God: "I am reliant on you. I am limited in wisdom, limited in knowledge, limited in power. Even when I think I know what would be for the best, I'm often wrong. But I am concerned about this person, or this situation, and know you are more concerned than I am - and more capable of doing something effective. I trust that you will, and hope that I'll recognise it when I see it. I know I don't have to worry, because I know you will do what is best."
George Herbert wrote a lot about prayer, and not all of it unanswered. In fact, he wrote several poems called "Prayer". I'll close with the first:
Prayer, the church's banquet; angel's age,
God's breath in man returning to his birth;
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage;
The Christian plummet, sounding heaven and earth;Engine against th' Almighty, sinner's tower,
Reverséd thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days' world transposing in an hour;
A kind of tune which all things hear and fear:Softness and peace and joy and love and bliss;
Exalted manna, gladness of the best;
Heaven in ordinary, man well dressed,
The milky way, the bird of paradise,Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,
The land of spices; something understood.
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