Prayer is one of the most beautiful, powerful and also frustrating disciplines any Christian will ever practice. In one sense, prayer is a fairly straightforward concept. It is simply asking God to do the things in our lives we can’t do. Yet the act of praying can occasionally feel disheartening because sometimes it seems like God isn’t listening. However, one of the greatest challenges a Christian’s faith will ever face is not from a prayer going unanswered, but from a prayer being answered in an unmiraculous way.
We’ve all heard the compelling stories of a miraculous check appearing in the mailbox for the exact amount needed to cover an astronomical medical bill. We’ve been inspired by stories of cancerous lumps vanishing and dumbfounding doctors. However, these stories are the exception, not the rule.
For most of us, the outstanding medical expense was covered by a bonus you received at your job or a family member who wanted to help you pay it. While helpful, you probably wouldn’t equate the experience with an undeniable answer to prayer, any more than you would associate a surgical removal of cancer with the miraculous healing you prayed for.
GOD IS WORKING BEHIND THE SCENES
The truth is, not every answer to prayer is a miracle. Often, God uses simple, natural processes to answer us.
Author C. S. Lewis addresses the struggles many Christians face with prayer in his book, The Screwtape Letters. The fictional demon Screwtape teaches his apprentice Wormwood how to discourage people from believing in the power of prayer:
“[Y]ou can worry [a Christian] with the haunting suspicion that the practice [of prayer] is absurd and can have no objective result … If the thing [a Christian] prays for doesn’t happen, then that is one more proof that petitionary prayers don’t work; if it does happen, [the Christian] will, of course, be able to see some of the physical causes which led up to it, and ‘therefore it would have happened anyway,’ and thus a granted prayer becomes just as good a proof as a denied one that prayers are ineffective.”
Read more A Christian’s Greatest Challenge Is Receiving an Unmiraculous Answer to Prayer.
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