Unanswered Prayer and Trust in God

For me (Jason) prayer was always about words. In my circles, intercessor was viewed as a spiritual office, like pastor and teacher. Prayer became a specialized skill, a badge for the super spiritual: we were “prayer warriors.” We saw the brokenness in our world, so we dropped to our knees in battle. Loved ones were fighting diseases; there were violence, natural disasters, and evil all around. Worse, people were dying without Jesus.

These were the enemies and our weapon was prayer. With our words we changed the world, impacted the physical and spiritual realms. If we woke in the night, we took it as a sign: time to pray. If we didn’t rise to the task, our loved ones might suffer.

The Burden of Unanswered Prayer

What a strange delusion of power. We treated the fate of our fellow humans as if it depended not on a loving Creator but on our midnight pleas, as though our lives were rooted not in God’s care but in the performance of prayer warriors. But these were God-sized burdens, and they were too much for us to carry around. The weight of the world—war and peace, life and death, joy and suffering, even heaven and hell—was far too heavy for our mortal shoulders.

Looking back, I’m convinced we were not wasting our time. Jesus invites us to bring our petitions to God. God tells us to ask for help. But God also tells us to trust. To be still. To be thankful. To rest. To meditate. To contemplate. To dwell. To bring God our groanings too deep for words.

I loved words then, and I still do. I love the ways you can shape them to build stories, to leave impressions, to make people cry. A teacher once told me that language was God’s greatest gift to us because language was the foundation of relationships. Without language, how can you know a person? That idea stuck with me. Maybe that’s why Jack’s diagnosis hit me as hard as it did.

Jack is my third child, my oldest son. He hit most of his developmental markers until he was two, but then something changed. His vocabulary disappeared. He stopped making eye contact. He began wandering around the house ignoring us, flapping spatulas in front of his face. We figured out what it was before the diagnosis came, but seeing the word on paper hit me hard: autism. It soon became clear that his was the kind of autism in which words would be rare.

Of course, this led me to prayer. Jack would grow up in a world that didn’t understand him, and he would deal with a host of comorbid conditions that would increase the difficulty of his life: obsessive compulsive disorder, seizures, and raging anxiety. So I prayed a lot. Which is to say, I used all my words when I came to God.

“Lord, help us to understand why he is screaming!”
“God, don’t let him run out onto the road again!”
“Please, please, please, let him sleep!”

But the thing we prayed for most was the gift of language. How could we know our son if we couldn’t converse with him? Isn’t language the foundation of relationship?

It didn’t occur to me then what an odd bargain I was trying to strike, using words to beg for words. And that’s the problem with viewing prayer primarily—or exclusively—as convincing God to act. Prayer can become all about how persuasive we can be at getting God to do what we want.

God didn’t answer my prayers anyway. By the time I reached forty, Jack was a teenager, still functionally nonverbal, still wrestling with the same comorbid conditions he’d always had.

So what happened to all those prayers I prayed in my twenties and thirties? What happened to yours, the ones that didn’t get approved through the bureaucracy of heaven? Did they ever receive a hearing? Did they accidentally get deleted from God’s hard drive? Or did God simply say no?

Church history has been far from silent on the issue of prayer. Believers throughout the centuries have wrestled with these exact questions and proposed profound answers. I wasn’t entirely blind to the answers they offered, but neither was I all that interested in ideas outside my immediate theological grid. In my charismatic circles, we were usually looking for mechanical help. How do I get God to answer? How do I pray with authority? How can I change my heart such that God will hear me? If the prayers of the righteous “availeth much” (James 5:16 KJV), how do I become more righteous? I didn’t want wisdom. I wanted results.

Wrestling with Prayer in Crisis

And that’s fair. When our hearts are aching, we don’t want to talk theology. In a crisis, we’re not drawn to learn from monks and sages; we don’t have time to ponder theories. We just need things to work. We just want the pain to go away.

When Prayer Feels Empty

We can’t deny our experiences with unanswered prayer. Not when our pending requests have piled up like junk-mail advertisements. That’s the thing that sucks the vitality out of prayer for many of us. It’s not that we don’t believe anymore; it’s just that our words feel so empty, like expired coupons that were never a good deal to begin with.

Finding Hope Through Unanswered Prayer

Once that pile of unanswered prayer gets high enough, you realize prayer can’t be about using your words to make God do your bidding.

Trusting God Beyond Unanswered Prayer

There’s a time to clench your fists and yell at the sky, but there’s a time to open your palms and surrender. A time to beg God for daily bread, a time to breathe “Your will be done” as Jesus taught his disciples to do.