On Prayer, a Vending Machine, Dr. Pepper and Snickers

I’m currently leading a small group study on Monday nights based on the book Prayer: Does it Make A Difference by Phillip Yancey.  One of the questions we started discussing last night was our own reason for participating in this study.

I shared that for me, I wanted to be able to understand prayer better.  I admit that there are times when I struggle with prayer.  I wonder why some of the prayers I pray are answered like I want them to be, and yet some (even the more serious ones I pray) of them are not.

It seems that everyone has prayed for someone who was sick or dying, and while some of them tell stories of miraculous healings—like the ones found in the New Testament—most of them do not.

And there’s the problem.

People want to know what it takes to get results from their prayers, the right kind of results.  How can they pray in a way that guarantees healing, or solves a very difficult situation?  When our prayers don’t work we tend to assume:

1. We didn’t have enough faith.
2. We didn’t pray the right prayer.
3. We didn’t say enough prayers.
4. We didn’t have the right people praying.

There is biblical support for each of those assumptions, but behind them all is the idea that if we could just learn how to do it correctly our prayers for healing would be answered.

I grew up in the mindset for the longest time that if you prayed and had enough faith, God would answer your prayer and give you what you wanted.  My response to this logic though is “how much faith is enough?”  It left me wondering if I was praying the right prayer, or praying enough or should I have asked a certain person who I thought was “closer” to God to pray.  This mindset left me more frustrated than anything else.

It’s almost like trying to get a vending machine to accept a wrinkled dollar bill.  You put it in the machine and the machine spits it back out.  You keep trying over and over again until the machine accepts the bill.  In your excitement, you push your selection and the machine either responds “Sold Out” or your candy bar gets stuck against the glass before it falls.

That’s the way it is with some of us, isn’t it?  We bow our heads and clasp our hands and offer up prayers like wrinkled dollar bills, hoping that one of these days God will accept them, but worrying at the same time that if and when he does the answer we are looking for may be sold out.

Is that really how it is?  Is that really how God works?  Like a vending machine in the sky from which we can get the answers to all our prayers if we can only figure out the secret?

I’d like to think God is more than that, and prayer is more than a way to get what we want.  These healing stories in the Gospels are reminders that God loves the world, and that he loved it so much he sent his only son, who ladled out God’s healing power on any who had need.  If God really does love us like that then we don’t have to “trick” him into hearing and answering our prayers.  And if God really is God then there is no way we can force him to do what we want.  Instead we can talk to him like a child might talk to loving parent, telling him exactly what we need or want and trusting him with the answer.

During my childhood and early teenage years, from time to time I would ask my dad to buy me a pack of baseball cards, bottles of Dr. Pepper or a Snickers bar.  Most of the time, he would say no.  If I asked him why, he would say that I didn’t need it or it wasn’t good for me, or he might just repeat his answer: “No!”  Every once in a while, however, he would say yes, and I would get excited over popping open a bottle of Dr. Pepper or opening a pack of baseball cards to see what potential treasure awaited.  Does my father love me?  Of course he does.  He shows it in any number of ways, and I came to trust his love so completely that even when he said no I could accept his answer.

There have been many occasions where I’ve sat with people and prayed with them during a difficult situation.  During those prayers, I always found myself coming back to the point where I say something along the lines of “God, we trust you with the answer to this prayer, and pray for your will to be done.”

It’s not easy, leaving things in God’s hands, but there are no better, stronger, or surer hands than those.