When I Pray ...

I have been there, and perhaps you have been there as well.  You are already feeling stretched by life – its disappointments and its unmet expectations – and words you desperately don’t want to hear spoken, are not only spoken, but they throw unwanted reality in your face – again.  Your heart groans with an unanswered “why?” as your world seems to crumble around you.  Disappointment.  Fear.  Crushing and agonizing emotions.  The rawness of your heart deepening with the burning tears you fight to keep control of.   The silence of God shouting into the darkening emptiness.  Wild imaginations distorting any semblance of understanding or reason.  Cocooned in suffocating reality with distant thoughts of all the “oughts” a Christian needs to hold onto, and having no capacity to do any of it.  Prayer?  Open and honest dialogue with God? Conscious dependence to invoke immeasurable grace?  It is the mirage in the desert of your tragedy.

It wasn’t my world that crashed today, but it was the world of a friend.  There were no words to “fix” her world and no actions that could undo, change, or effectively remedy her situation – at least none that I had any capability of doing.  I could listen though, and I could pray.  God knew the turmoil of her world better than I did, and even better than she did.  And yet prayer, uttered by her own lips and heart, was somehow lost within her desperation, bound by her unwanted reality.  I prayed and I wept, mindful of the times I had been where she was today – needing the prayers of someone else to uphold me before God’s throne of grace.  The words of a long-ago song rehearsed in my mind and my heart the unspoken request she had brought to me.  When you pray, will you pray for me, for I need His love and His care.  When you pray, will you pray for me, will you whisper my name in your prayer?

I have been encouraged many times by the prayers of others.  It is a gift that says someone cares.  It is a gift that reminds me God cares.   It is a gift that helps me understand why the darkness was lifted or the impossible became possible.  It is a gift that opens my heart to the presence of God and all that He desires to give to me.  I could not, but someone else could, and she did.  I want to give that gift to others.  When I pray, I will pray for you, for you need His love and His care.  When I pray, I will pray for you, I will whisper your name in my prayer.

                                                                                                    – Bev

(Related Bible reading: Ephesians 6:18; 1 Thessalonians 5:17; Philippians 4:6; James 5:13-18)