Stupid Prayer by Pete Greig

Published: October 5th, 2005

"The more you learn," wrote George Bernard Shaw, "the less you know." Coming from a curmudgeonly, old atheist like Shaw, it's a pretty good summary of my Christian experience. Whenever I think I've got God nailed down, I find myself cradling a bunch of dirty, old grave clothes. Happens every time.
 
Having been involved with this weird and wonderful 24-7 prayer movement for 5 or 6 years now, I confess that I am considerably more stupid than I was at the start. Back then it was simple: Just pray. A lot. And stuff will happen. Pop a prayer in one end. Add a splash of faith. And sure as eggs is eggs an hallelujah will emerge eventually. Easy.
 
But five years on I find myself regularly bamboozled as to why some prayers are answered dramatically while others  appear  to have been ignored. I'm troubled by my own stupid audacity when I thank God for a parking space while millions cry out uselessly for the lives of their starving children.
These days I find myself regularly bamboozled
 
Storming the heavenlies
 Last week I was in the German city of Dresden at a gathering of 24-7 activists when news reached us of another, equally powerful hurricane, which was due to hit Houston, Texas within six hours. Helplessly we prayed. Some of us had just returned from ministering to survivors of Hurricane Katrina in Houston, the very target of this next storm. Nervously I glanced at my wife who still hasn't been entirely healed of her serious condition after years of prayer. Yet she, too, was crying out to God. The next day news reached us that the hurricane had unexpectedly turned through ninety degrees. Not a single life had been lost. We cheered. We believed our prayers had worked. We thanked God.
 
But had our prayers really made such a massive difference? Are we really that important? And if we are, how on earth are we to live with the responsibility? The fact is that we weren't the only ones praying against the elements that night. We were part of a chorus, and if our prayers 'worked' it was a very big 'our' that did it.
 
Another Brick in The Wall
I heard about an American youth group who had, quite by chance, prayed for the Berlin Wall to fall the day before it did so, and returned home with their heads spinning with the power of prayer. Was it really their prayers that demolished the divide?
 
In Dresden the night after that Hurricane Rita miracle, a man came to speak to us who knows a thing or two about prayer. Dr. Christian Fuhrer mobilized 400,000 people to pray against communism in the East German city of Leipzig until the Berlin Wall came tumbling to the ground. Referring to this act of mass defiance one official later admitted that 'we were prepared for every eventuality but not for candles and not for prayers.' So was it the American youth group or was it the unrelenting prayers of thousands? Of course, it was both.
 
We cannot deprive that youth group of the joy of participating in such an answered prayer. This is, I suspect, the whole point of the heavenly partnership expressed in prayer. We share in Christ's sufferings and in his joys. we are creatively involved in the very patterns of history and life. That youth group was right to return to America with their heads spinning and their hearts singing. And we were right to cheer and thank God when hurricane Rita changed course in answer to prayer.
 
Today I bought chocolate for one of my kids and I also prayed for the terrible persecution in North Korea. Love knows no scale. I guess I am learning to pray in the same sort of way I used to pray - when I was the kid being bought chocolate by his dad.
 
These days I pray because I believe very simply (and some would say very stupidly) that my Father hears me and that he cares.
 
I don't know why he would only half-heal my wife. I don't know why he would avert one hurricane and not the other. I used to have answers for those kinds of questions. But the more I learn, the less I know. And the less I know the more I trust. And the more I trust the more I dare to pray.

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