A couple of weeks ago, our church service featured a fireside chat/discussion about prayer. We spent the whole service talking about what prayer is for each of us, what kinds of baggage we might have coming from our various institutional churches. We pondered what exactly it is that prayer does. How does it work? What is the purpose of prayer, we wondered. As is fairly usual for my church we didn’t come to any conclusions. I don’t think I was alone in leaving with the tiniest frustration that we spent the whole service talking about prayer and then, um, didn’t pray. My largest fear with my wonderful little faith community is that we tend to over-intellectualize things, especially those issues which might bite too close to the bone.

In any case, I’ve spent a fair amount of time since that Sunday thinking about prayer and about my particular journey with prayer over the past 17 years. Whoosh … that’s a long time.

I’ve read many books on prayer. The most influential was Richard Foster’s Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home. I’ve read it a couple of times. His writing and beliefs on prayer have become internalized and I have no ability to review the book with any sense of objectivity. I’ve read other books which promise to unlock certain aspects of God, they promise health, wealth, vitality, etc. if one will just follow this or that particular prayer formula.

I’ve certainly had my ups and downs with prayer. I remember the young father of 2 little boys in our community group, diagnosed with cancer. We laid hands on him. Anointed him with oil. We prayed over him, for him. If effort counted for anything he would still be alive. But he died after 6 months. There was nothing the doctors could do … and they did try. Prayer, seemingly, did nothing. But maybe it did. Who knows. Perhaps he lived longer, perhaps he lived easier. Perhaps his wife felt stronger for all of it. I remember my cousin’s child who died after 3 days in intensive care and after my cousin donated part of his liver in an effort to save his dying son. Four churches were praying for the boy and still he died.

I came to learn that God does not call us to pray because we can have control over a situation. It should be obvious to all of us that we do not. There are scientific studies which prove that prayer has a positive effect on people with chronic and terminal illness, but no one knows why. Some things must remain a mystery.

I’ve come to a place where I’m beginning to understand that God has asked us to pray because He wants the pleasure of our company. It’s so simple that it’s mind boggling. He just wants to be in communion with His creation. Sometimes that communion will cause a change in events. Sometimes it will not. Sometimes it will cause a change in us. Sometimes it won’t. Sometimes it will ease our burdens. Sometimes it will cause them to be heavier. But we cannot change outcomes with our words, we can only participate in redemption. There is no magic formula that will change our lives. We cannot do it at a specific time each day or in a specific way and hope that the mere chanting of words will create a cleansed soul within us. We can merely turn ourselves little by little, degree by degree until we are facing in the direction of God and learning to pray and breath at the same time.