I realise this title probably made you open this blog and you might imagine I’m going to say I’ve stopped praying or I don’t agree with it or I’m just giving up – I think you’ll be relieved to know I’m not going to say any of those things, but I do want to share are some thoughts of where I’m at with my praying journey. I may have more questions than answers right now, so I’m simply sharing my heart…..

Here is what I know:

God is good. He loves his children more than we understand. He is perfect in all of his ways. He tells us to pray ‘on earth as it is in heaven’. There is no sickness in heaven, there is no death in heaven so I want to believe that if someone appears to be dying too soon or is living in unnecessary suffering (not the kind that may bring glory to God), I can pray the same for my friends/family on earth, right? I want to see results as a direct connection to my prayer.

Some other things that I know:

My prayers don’t always get answered in the way I would like –  My friends die (too early, at least for me). Families break up. Sicknesses don’t get healed. ‘On earth as it is in heaven’…….

You’re probably thinking, well if your prayers don’t get answered, it must have been God’s will for your friends to die. If that’s the case, then why pray? Why not just be fatalistic and say ‘ God, let your will be done’ and head off to the beach? I feel like that is a cop-out. Here’s why I think that: generally speaking, if someone recovers, it’s God’s will and if the same person dies, it’s God’s will – they can’t both be God’s will, can they?

We all get emails, face book messages, tweets etc… asking us to pray for situations that are sometimes just horrible. The church rises, it fasts (if it’s really bad) it prays, tragedy strikes, the church is devastated and we don’t ask why, we just say, Oh well, it must have been God’s will….. So I ask the question I started with, what on earth is the point of praying? I’m tired of being asked to pray and not getting the desired answer.

Personally, I can’t accept this hit and miss kind of Christianity. I just can’t and I don’t want to – I’ll go as far as to say I don’t think God wants me to either. . I want to know what it is to get answered prayer every time, even if that is a ‘no’ and if it’s a ‘no’ I want find out as early in the prayer process as possible, instead of just not knowing. I’ve asked the Lord to help me with this and this is what I think He said.

The church is not close enough to him  to hear his voice. Intimacy is a rare thing. The general level of prayer amongst leaders is puny, therefore the level of the churches’ prayer is also puny. If we would hear his  voice daily, then when tragedy comes, He might just whisper, ‘no need to pray for this, I’m calling my son/daughter home’ Of course, it would still be sad for the people left behind,  but the peace we would all have would carry us through. Instead, the church goes into a frenzy of prayer only for the answers not to come and I,  for one, am left shaking my head asking, what was the point of praying?

We have to get back to taking prayer seriously. I address myself too. Some of you reading this will definitely have a strong prayer life, most of you won’t. That’s because we don’t really believe God answers prayer. It’s not what you say that you believe, it’s what you do, so if you don’t go to your churche’s prayer meeting (if they have one – God help us if they don’t), you don’t really believe in prayer.

God is not mean, but I just think he wants us to know him better. For me, I want to really know how or what to pray in any given situation and to do that, I need intimacy with him. If I can pray confidently, knowing what God’s will is, my prayer life will be lot less ‘lottery’ like and a whole lot more ‘fact’ like.

I wish I had more answers and maybe as I continue to ask, I’ll get more. My challenge to the church is don’t not ask questions. Be bold enough to ask, did we miss something?

The same spirit that raised Christ from the dead is living in you and me giving life to our mortal flesh….(Romans 8:11)  Where is that spirit? On the inside of me!  So, let’s not rest until we see what we all long to see. Will you have to get out of bed a little earlier in order to see it? Maybe…. How hard are we prepared to work for it? …..it’s our shift, let’s arise.