Can be hard to reckon with. If I’m being completely honest, even after 30 years of following Jesus pretty darn seriously, and after quite a number of prayers significantly answered, I’m sometimes still a little sore about the ones that were not.
Some of them I know never will be. The opportunity has passed. Some of them still could be, I suppose, but it’s been so long that I’ve pretty much stopped asking. And I suppose some of them may be answered in an unexpected way, but if the answer looks so different from the request that it doesn’t help me connect the dots—well, I don’t know what to do with that.
Now, I know the responses:
“Never give up praying for that thing.”
“Maybe you simply need to have more faith.”
“What if your miracle is just one more prayer away?”
Yada, yada, yada.
None of that, in my experience, is very helpful. To me or to anyone else that I’ve tried to say such things. If anything, these kinds of comments just seem to sidestep the frustration and only discourage further prayer.
No. For me, the longer I practice prayer—and the more prayers that go unanswered—the more I begin to empathize with Jesus and his unanswered prayer. Yes, even Jesus, the Son of God, with direct access to the Father, prayed a prayer that still goes unanswered: his prayer for unity among his people.
In fact, one could argue that in the nearly 2,000 years since he prayed that prayer, we have only caused things to go backwards and spiral downwards and divide further apart. When I compare that to the existential agony I endure for my comparatively minor unanswered prayers, I suddenly forget my meager woes.
