PRAYER

When I was in college, my English professor used to regale the class with definitions from Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary. For example: Conservative (noun) A statesman who is enamoured of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others. Lawyer (noun) One skilled in circumvention of the law. My prof’s favorite was that of prayer: to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.

As with all of Bierce’s definitions there is a very real ring of truth about them. Most conservatives I know, religious and political, get all bent out of shape around existing evils: taxes and sexual issues being two. And most liberals I know, myself included, invariably arrive at solutions to these problems by creating other problems rather than real answers. A good defense lawyer’s job is to find a way around a law or a reason why his client is exempt from the law.

So, too, whenever we pray to God, we most assuredly confess our unworthiness to approach God in prayer because we are sinful human beings. And that we are. We dare not do otherwise. And there are times in prayer when we most assuredly ask God to either annul or at least bend the laws of the universe on our behalf. That’s what a miracle is, is it not: asking God to go against nature?

Are we fools? Are we wasting our time? Are we wrong? Is that what prayer is all about? Well, yes and no. It’s not what prayer is all about but prayer is about some of that. We do pray that God work miracles on our behalf, or at least on behalf of someone we love at our request. And sometimes our prayer takes the form of yelling at God in anger or begging with tears streaming down our cheeks or, in some instances, both.

We’re not fools or wasting our time or are wrong when we pray for miracles, pray that the laws of nature be annulled on our behalf because we believe, no, because we know God can and sometimes does do exactly that. Not always, but at least often enough for us to pray in the hope that God will make another exception to the laws of nature just this once more and for us or for someone we love.

Lewis B. Smedes said it best: “I think we should see miraculous healings not as a way of solving human suffering, but as whimsical signals – to be taken sometimes with a bit of humor, not made too much of, but still signals – that God is alive, that Christ is Lord, and that suffering is not the last word about human existence.” Whimsical signals: playful, fanciful, impulsive acts on God’s part on our behalf.

It is God who is in control and not us, and we know it. That is why we ask God to give some of that control into our hands by giving in to our prayers, our wishes and wants. Yet, like Bierce’s definition of a conservative and a liberal, sometimes our solution to the problem may be worse than the problem itself or we are creating more problems in having our prayers answered. Bierce reminds us that we need to be aware of what we are asking and Smedes reminds us that God really does know best.