Why I'm Afraid to Pray

Sometimes you meet people...even over Facebook...and you know they are the real deal...You realize your life looks a lot like there life or maybe you wish it did...This is my friend, Kirsten.  She is a writer.  She is a mother of four.  She is on a roller derby team.  She fights against human trafficking.  She loves Jesus and lives it out loud.  And she is funny.  Which is so dang important y'all.  She has written the following post on prayer in her life.  Enjoy.  And go find Kirsten over at her blog too...

www.kirstenoliphant.com

When the Lord first called me to him, back in my oh-so-mature middle school days, it was through the pages of a Bible. I sat at my desk with a Bible given to me in Sunday School. Until the summer before my eighth grade year, I had never cracked its spine. Stiff from disuse, its pages smelled new.

“In the beginning God” overwhelmed me, so I flipped open the Bible at random and wrote down pretty verses into a flowered journal with my purple Bic pen. I thought of the words as inspirational quotes. Writing them down helped dissipate the nagging guilt that hung like a dirty fog over me. I had tried for years to shake the guilt off, but I couldn’t seem to lose it and didn’t know what I even felt guilty about. I was just a normal teenage girl, after all. Imperfect, sure.  An ax murderer? Not even close.

Reading the Bible put more weight on the “good deed” side of the scale which balanced my actions. Life was about doing more good than bad, right? Still the guilt hung there, heavy in the air around me, nagging and noxious. The words in the Bible beat it back, but only a little. 

And then God opened my eyes and I saw that my guilty fog had hung over Jesus on the cross. He wore it on his body, bleeding and dying so the fog could lift from me. There was no scale I had to keep balanced; Jesus took my guilt for me and replaced it with his goodness.

Then the words on those Bible pages became life, real LIFE to me. I devoured them the same way I voraciously read through every Stephen King book in sixth grade. God programmed me to love words. Like Ezekiel, I ate through God’s words and they were sweet as honey.

Prayer was another matter.  

I would read the Bible and scrawl thoughts in my notebook until my hand cramped, but always zipped through my prayers.

I’m Prince Humperdink up at the altar in the Princess Bride saying, “Skip to the end.”

My prayers then have not changed much through the years: short and silent as I go about my busy day. I toss my prayers up to God the way you toss strands of cooked spaghetti on the wall to see they are ready. I hope my spaghetti prayers stick, because they comprise the majority of my prayer life. I continually struggle with the kinds of prayers that take time and involve praying out loud by myself. 

At first I thought perhaps I just didn’t like praying as much as I liked reading. Which is fine! God did create us all with unique gifts and desires. But over the years I have come to face the reality that my tendency toward rushing prayer isn’t about preferring to read the Bible. I am afraid to pray.

Why do I fear prayer?

There isn’t an official phobia related to the fear of prayer. (I checked.) This may mean that I’m the only one. I hope so! I would love to be only one struggling with prayer-a-phobia. But as I continued to think about why I run from prayer, I realized three specific aspects of fear that may cling to you as well.   

I fear that God is not there. 

I fear that I will raise my voice in an empty room, and it will be just that: an empty room with a woman talking to herself. I fear that God will not show up. This really boils down to the doubt in his existence, or at least a doubt that he cares about MY existence. If I pray by myself, I am trusting the unlikely story that an invisible, all-powerful, all-knowing, totally perfect God who spoke all of existence into being with a word, THAT almighty God is in the room with me. When he has a whole world to run and so many better things to do, He hears my prayers. That seems so foolish, so improbable.

At its core, my fear that God is not there reveals my doubts about my very faith. If I pray in the stillness, out loud or silently, it is an act of faith. It is like an actionable creed, a profession that I believe God knows my name and hears my words.

A rational fear, really. Why would a holy God with the power to speak stars into existence care enough to hear my words? Who am I? We cannot answer why God hears, but he promises that he does hear and is here. How much greater does this make the reality of prayer! Jesus promised to be with his people always, even to the end of the age (Matthew 28:20) and said that God sees us when we pray (Matthew 6:6). In that room (or in my car or with my children) when I pray, I am far from alone.

I fear that God will not answer.

If I can overcome my fear that God isn’t there, I then fear pressing my knees to the floor and raising my voice to a God who does not answer. This fear imagines God like one of the Queen’s Guardsmen in their red uniforms outside Buckingham Palace. Whatever I pray, there is no movement, no reaction. God is present, but his gaze is elsewhere. I can scream and shout and rail and beg and jump up and down, but he remains impassive.

This fear is the first of two fears with the same root: the idea that God doesn’t care. My dreams and desires are too small for God. The things I care about are not the things he cares about. I am too insignificant to warrant a response.

Then I think of Hagar, Sarah’s maidservant who gave birth to Ishmael, Abraham’s son. She was woman in a culture where women were little more than property. As a servant and made to be a sort of concubine, she was property, used and abused and cast off by her master Abraham and mistress Sarah. Yet twice God sought her out in the desert. He became to Hagar the God Who Sees (Genesis 16:13). I love that God seeks out those who are cast off and seen as having little worth. Even if you don’t feel your worth or the world makes you feel worthless, you are significant to God. You are precious to him.

When I pray and when you pray, we are speaking to the God Who Sees, the God who sought out Hagar in the desert.

I fear that God WILL answer.

The implied rest of that sentence is that I fear that he will answer and I won’t like it. I fear laying down my desires and loves at his feet because he might take them away. I fear telling him what I really want because he might want something else for me.

Jesus compared God’s love for us to that of a father. What father would give his child a stone when the child asks for bread? Or a snake instead of a fish? When God answers prayers, it is always with the fish instead of a snake, yet the truth is that sometimes I long for the snake. I don’t want tuna; give me the rattlesnake. I want what I want, and it isn’t always (or even usually) what’s best for me. I ask for his will, yet cross my fingers for what I really want. 

When God answers my prayers, whether it is what I desire or something entirely surprising from him, it is a miraculous thing. It is the God of creation coming into my normal and ordinary life. When I pray, there is the sound of the temple curtain being torn in two, removing the barrier between me and a holy God. 

When God answers prayers it shakes up my comfort and my status quo and my very easy life. It reminds me that my life is more than this simple, ordinary chaos—there is a greater something at work in these days of children and blog and binge-watching Netflix. There is Something More and that Something is a SomeONE: a knowable God who wants something more for me than the American Dream of Comfort. He wants more for me than a worn spot on a sofa. He wants feet fitted with the readiness of the gospel and when he answers prayers, it is always in relation to me needing to have ready feet.

I fear that God will answer because then my perfectly comfortable life might be shaken up with the reality of something so much greater.

 I fear really living the abundant life Jesus promised in John 10:10.

These are the fears that keep my knees soft and my prayers hurried. These are the fears that keep me from living out a tiny verse that seems to shout at me whenever I think of prayer:

Be still and know that I am God.

(Psalm 46:10)

I am not good at stillness. My heart and my mind wander race from thing to thing and idea to idea and with four kids it is too quick a pace to be still. My fears of prayer make my thoughts chaotic and frantic like a disturbed fire ant mound. My to-do list hijacks my stillness. The blip of a new Facebook notification or the buzz of my phone vibrating out a new message interrupts the silence.

Prayer, ultimately, is about knowing HE IS GOD. It is about coming into his presence, whether around the dinner table or sitting in the carpool line or working in a cubicle or running with a jogging stroller or scrubbing the bathroom floor or sitting in silence with your knees on the ground. We are to be still and KNOW. I can have a stillness of heart even in the chaos of late afternoon when I’m trying to get dinner on the table and four children are scrabbling about my feet.

God wants me to toss up those spaghetti prayers, creating an inner stillness as I know he is God in the midst of the noise. But God also wants me to come before him in a quiet room, shrugging off my fears to know that he is God.

To KNOW he is God.

To know HE is God.

To know he IS God.

To know he is GOD.

Prayer, whether in the quiet or in the chaos, has a way of stilling hearts, a way of bring the truth to light. I may always struggle with setting aside time for solitary, out-loud, on-my-face prayer, but confronting my fears has revealed the beautiful truth of who he is. I am fearful, but he is mighty. I am lowly, but he cares for me. I am frantically busy, but he is peace.

Even when I refuse stillness, he is God.

But when I surrender?

Then I KNOW him so much more.