A Struggle With Prayer

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“Teach me your way, O Lord, and I will walk in your truth; give me an undivided heart, that I may fear your name” Psalm 86:11 (NIV, UK).

A few years ago a woman and her family went on a trip for a long-awaited and much anticipated vacation to a cottage out in the country. It was a long hot drive early in the summer and her husband, as was his custom, did all the driving. He liked to drive and she liked to let him.

They arrived at the cozy little cottage out there in the country and Ian, her husband, carried the luggage up from the car (overloaded, as was his other custom), found the bedroom, plopped the bags down and said, “Ah, this is lovely; we’ll enjoy it here.”

With that, he crumpled onto the floor in a heap, succumbing to a stroke.

Needless to say, the vacation became something quite different as Janet had to call for paramedics to come take Ian to hospital where he was diagnosed, treated, and finally transported home for his recovery.

Janet, a long-time woman of faith confesses, “The strange thing was, that in all this terror and confusion and dreadful anxiety, I was unable to pray. I couldn't get my mind past the horrors of the moment. I couldn't begin to think beyond Ian and the family and what might happen. I wanted to pray, I desperately wanted to pray, but I couldn't. So I rang up my vicar back home and asked for the prayers of the congregation. And I very soon felt surrounded and upheld and strengthened by the prayers of friends and family.”

Sometimes it is just plain hard to pray. Sometimes prayer feels more mechanical than human, more like a duty than a pleasure. Sometimes the heart and soul just find themselves so plunged into the depths of despair and fear that there are no words that will rise to the surface to make their way to God – if there is a God.

It is at times like that it is so important to have a community of faith to which one can turn, to which one can hope against hope that the heavy lifting of prayer will be carried out in faith, hope, and charity.

There are times I cannot pray; times where I am so estranged from God, or from myself, or from those I love that I need others to do that praying for me. God knows it. God knows it good and well.

God created us: strange, social creatures; called to gather ‘round the fire to share our stories, to speak our dreams; giving voice to the terrors that assail us, and holding hands as we lift each other up to God in prayer, either silently or aloud.

Sometimes we think of spirituality as our personal and private contact with God, and I will admit that spirituality is deeply personal, but I have come to believe that true spirituality can never be private.

A private faith would require confining the Spirit, and I have learned over the years that God will not be corked!

I have found that the times it is hardest for me to pray are not the times when I am under stress, but the times when I am imploding – collapsing in on myself, isolating myself from the world of family and friends.

In the psalm (86), we find one solution to struggling with prayer is to look beyond the confines of our own skin and to ask God for instruction: “Teach me, O Lord!” To be taught, we’ve got to be open. That means we’ve got to be willing to get out of our own skin and open to letting God in through others.

Secondly, the psalmist prays: “Give me an undivided heart that I may fear your name.”

Our struggles with prayer, as often as not, are the result of knowing what we ought to do, but about which we would rather do something else. It is the conflict of a divided heart that strangles one’s capacity to pray; so our “need” is to discern God’s direction – that which fulfills God’s honor – and go for it; God’s desire, after all, is our peace and welfare, our capacity to live in harmony with God and one another – without stroking out – in this, our world.