It Doesn't Really Matter If or How We Pray

What it Doesn’t Mean that “God is in Control” Part V

Most people I know, including myself, feel as though we fail at prayer. We have this ambiguous ideal in mind, and we rarely meet it. We don’t pray “enough,” we tell ourselves. But what is “enough” anyway? Well, according to Paul, it’s prayer that is unceasing—and that adjective seems to underscore even more that we’ve missed the mark!  

Is it possible that one reason we don’t pray is that we don’t imagine it really matters? After all, if God is in control—in other words, if God calls all the shots—why bother to pray? Does it make any difference? 

If I retrace my steps and what led me to begin this series on What it doesn’t mean that God is in Control; if I consider the questions that began to surface for me when I started to read about open and relational theology, especially the writings of Tom Oord, I can trace it back to one thing—my sense of failure in prayer.  

You see, weeks and months before the election, I began to pray earnestly for a particular outcome, an outcome that didn’t happen. Some of you reading this hope that my failed prayer has convinced me that I wasn’t praying “according to God’s will.” I would say that now more than ever, I’m persuaded this isn’t the case. 

But I do have some assessments of how I prayed as I reflect on what I’ve been learning, on what has been making sense to me regarding the way God engages with and influences our lives and world. While I think it was and is crucial for each of us to have conversations with God about anything and everything that concerns us, I have come to embrace three grounding principles that relate to petitionary prayer:

1. God doesn’t always get what God desires, even when we pray for what God desires.

2. God, whose Love is inherently uncontrolling, will never act in a way that goes against Love, even to answer our prayer.  

3. God can’t bring about what God ultimately desires singlehandedly but requires the participation of his human and heavenly angels.  

   
   

Let me elaborate on each of these points a bit:

As I wrote in Part II, it’s evident that God doesn’t always get God’s way. Just consider all the tragedies that have happened even in this last week! It’s obvious, given the state of our climate and degrading planet, the wars that rage on several continents, the unbridled racism that thrives in our own country, that evil abounds! Yet we often imagine that for God to be God, to be “sovereign,” God must always get what God wants. After all, isn’t that the epitome of power and control? 

In contrast to the notion of an invincible God, I wonder if God also experiences a lot of disappointment. I believe that God yearns to show us love and compassion, yet allows us to resist and refuse and go our own way. I trust that God is present and engaged in all things, the “most moved Mover,” always seeking to do good in the same way that rainwater seeks thirsty ground. And yet God exists (non-anxiously) in the context of our drought, grieving with us and for us. I imagine God “walking in the cool of the evening” (Genesis 3:8), searching for where we are hiding from Love.  

God will never act in a way that goes against God’s uncontrolling love, even to answer our prayer.  Does that surprise you? In reflecting on this second point, I realized now that when I prayed for the election, I asked God to act in ways that would have been inconsistent with God’s loving, non-coercive nature. Now, to be fair, I prayed phrases that came straight out of the Bible’s prayer manual—the book of Psalms. And I realize now that for God to have answered my prayers, God would have had to act against God’s true nature.  

God simply can’t do that. As evidence, consider Paul’s strong words to Timothy that even when we are faithless, God remains faithful because God cannot deny or contradict God’s self. (II Timothy 2:13) God is always uncontrolling Love and therefore will never force or coerce us to comply with what God desires. That helps me recognize that the outcome of this past election doesn’t necessarily confirm that God got what God wanted. It merely confirms that many of my fellow citizens got what they wanted. And now we are living with the results. Sigh. 

Finally, for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven, God will need our cooperation. When preventable tragedies happen that go against the will of God, like wars or gun violence or the desecration of our earth, they always involve humans and/or evil systems. Likewise, for God to heal our planet, to bring about peace and justice and all the virtues of a civil society, God will rely upon us and our better angels! 

Our struggle today isn’t really, or at least solely, against one another. In reality, we’re struggling against cosmic powers of darkness, spiritual forces of evil. (Eph. 6:12) Don’t you sense it? I sure do! I think this must account, in part, for the evil, immoral, violent acts of aggression that are increasing and defining our present reality, this present darkness.  

And remarkably, God invites us, just as Jesus taught us, to join with the Spirit to pray. God aches for our flourishing and is actively pursuing it with our cooperation. Not through force or violence or ultimatums, but through gracious, forgiving, merciful, mighty, uncontrolling acts of Love. It does matter if and how we pray.

Warmly, Beth Booram