{"id":46,"date":"2010-04-22T10:43:00","date_gmt":"2010-04-22T10:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/thinplaces\/2010\/04\/prayer-is-stupid-unless.html"},"modified":"2010-04-22T10:43:00","modified_gmt":"2010-04-22T10:43:00","slug":"prayer-is-stupid-unless","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/2010\/04\/prayer-is-stupid-unless.html","title":{"rendered":"Prayer Is Stupid, Unless…"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

On Good Friday, Peter and I went to our church to participate in a 24-hour prayer vigil. We’ve never done something like that before, hired a babysitter on a Friday night so we could go pray with some other people we don’t know. It was after that experience that I realized, prayer is stupid. Well, really what I realized is that it\u2019s stupid unless<\/i> God actually exists and God actually cares about a relationship with people. It’s stupid unless<\/i> God can effect change in this world. It’s stupid unless<\/i> there is a spiritual reality that intersects with the reality that we feel and touch and see every day.<\/p>\n

Many Christians would say that prayer and Bible reading are important elements of a daily \u201cwalk with God.\u201d And I certainly don\u2019t disagree. But the Bible reading part comes much more easily to me. Some of that is simply a matter of personality. I love words, and the Bible is full of them. But I think my preference for Bible reading over prayer has more to do with a lack of faith than it does with personality. See, Bible reading is productive even if God isn\u2019t there. The language is beautiful. The history is interesting. And, when I finish reading, I can measure what I\u2019ve accomplished. It interacts easily with my physical reality. It helps me with art history and literature and music. There is a practical utility to Scripture reading. <\/p>\n

But prayer? Prayer is absurd, inefficient, immeasurable. Stupid. Unless<\/i> it\u2019s true that God exists, interacts, and cares, in which case prayer is an inexhaustible gift to my spirit. <\/p>\n

I’ve been rereading Paul Miller’s book, A Praying Life<\/a><\/i>.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

(And, honestly, if you’re even remotely interested in this stuff, buy the book and read it. It’s thought-provoking, well-written, and as down-to-earth and real as they come. I cannot recommend it more highly.) Paul writes about praying like a child–asking as if God wants to take care of us. And he writes about understanding our lives as a narrative, which means understanding our lives as lives of purpose, woven into the meaning of the entire universe. Our lives as participation in God’s story. <\/p>\n

I have a good friend who says that talking about your prayer life is a lot like talking about your sex life. It’s hard to talk about, especially when it’s good. It’s almost too intimate, too personal. It sounds like bragging to tell a story, especially when my prayer was “answered” quickly, and someone else’s wasn’t. <\/p>\n

There’s a part of me that wants to write about all the prayers I’ve seen answered over the course of my life, faithless as it has been, but I’m not sure I want to think about prayer in terms of requests and answers anymore. I more believe that prayer connects our physical lives to a spiritual reality. Our prayers aren’t so much answered as they are incorporated into that reality. Prayer allows us to see the tender mercy and gracious love of God. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Good Friday, Peter and I went to our church to participate in a 24-hour prayer vigil. We’ve never done something like that before, hired a babysitter on a Friday night so we could go pray with some other people we don’t know. It was after that experience that I realized, prayer is stupid. Well,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":88,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-down-syndrome"],"yoast_head":"\nPrayer Is Stupid, Unless... - Thin Places<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/2010\/04\/prayer-is-stupid-unless.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Prayer Is Stupid, Unless... - Thin Places\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"On Good Friday, Peter and I went to our church to participate in a 24-hour prayer vigil. 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Two major life experiences have shaped her writing and her faith\u00e2\u20ac\u201dcaring for her mother-in-law as she battled cancer and welcoming her daughter Penny into the world after she was diagnosed at birth with Down syndrome. Both experiences expanded and enriched her understanding of what it means to be human and to receive each and every person as a gift.\u00c2\u00a0 A graduate of Princeton University and Princeton Theological Seminary, she is the author of Penelope Ayers: A Memoir, and the forthcoming A Good and Perfect Gift (Bethany House). Her essays have appeared in First Things, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Christian Century, ChristianityToday.com, and Bloom, among other online venues.","sameAs":["http:\/\/amyjuliabecker.com"],"url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/author\/amyjuliabecker"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/88"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}