Prayer and a Larger Story

Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life

I often find that when God doesn’t answer a prayer, he wants to expose something in me. Our prayers don’t exist in a world of their own. We are in dialogue with a personal, divine Spirit who wants to shape us as much as he wants to hear us. For God to act unthinkingly with our prayers would be paganism, which says the gods do our will in response to our prayers.

When someone’s prayers aren’t answered, I want to know the back-story. . . . Most of us isolate prayer from the rest of what God is doing in our lives, but God doesn’t work that way. Prayer doesn’t exist in some rarified spiritual world; it is part of the warp and woof of our lives. Praying itself becomes a story (168).

If the [answer] comes too quickly, there is no room for discovery, for relationship. . . . The waiting that is the essence of faith provides the context for relationship. Faith and relationship are interwoven in dance. Everyone talks now about how prayer is relationship, but often what people mean is having warm fuzzies with God. Nothing wrong with warm fuzzies, but relationships are far richer and more complex (190-191).

Do you see the difference between making an isolated prayer request and praying in context of the story that God is weaving? . . . Most of our prayers are answered in the context of the larger story that God is weaving.

To live in our Father’s story, remember these three things:

1. Don’t demand that the story go your way. . . .
2. Look for the Storyteller. Look for his hand, and then pray in light of what you are seeing. . . .
3. Stay in the story. Don’t shut down when it goes the wrong way (201).

Aaron Orendorff

If I’m being honest (and good books have a tendency to make a person honest), when it comes to prayer, my gauge as to whether God is listening and responding almost always boils down to little more than whether or not life is going the way I want it. And of course, this feeling is as fickle as it is petty. For example, from 9am-noon, life goes well, I feel good about how “things” (usually meaning my own worth and reputation) are progressing and so (naturally) I feel “close” to God, assured that the Father hears and answers. Then, I have a bad lunch, someone treats me poorly, life goes sideways (and not even crazy sideways, mind you, it just doesn’t go the way I want), I look bad or I feel bad or I just feel awkward and suddenly, “Where’s God? This is just want I expected.” Fear comes crashing in and all of my “warm fuzzies,” as Miller calls them, go tumbling here and there.

But to live within a story larger than my own, one in which God is both the author and hero (which means, of course, by uncomfortable but refreshing consequence, that I myself am not) is an invitation to pray not that my kingdom come, nor that my will be done, but to instead ask for His. It is to pray as an agent of the coming kingdom. To pray with and for kingdom ends: ends that are better though not always in line with my own. Though such prayer is often more mysterious and far less like the spiritual, lottery ticket I oh-so-desperately want, it is prayer that matters, prayer that invites relationship, prayer that reaches beyond life on my terms and begins (slowly and with faltering success) to grow larger than good feelings about how I look.