When we speak to God are we affecting His plans? Are we influencing the future? And if not, why do we persist in asking God to listen to our wishes? The most thoughtful people I know can’t help wondering.
Jesus taught his disciples to ask in prayer for specific blessings: for our daily bread; to forgive our transgressions; to help us in some way against temptation; and to deliver us from evil. But it feels less appropriate to turn our prayers into a wish list of our own desires, or a memo to God on improving his management style. Asking God to bring about something specific for me — a new job, acceptance to a school, approval for a mortgage – seems downright cheesy.
Even asking for good things to happen for other people still has that faint whiff of greed, as if we’re treating God as a cosmic dispenser of goodies and if we deposit enough pennies of prayer eventually we’ll get the toy ring along with our gum ball.
C.S. Lewis’s literary demon Screwtape has something insightful to say, as he often does. He tells his nephew that humans rarely pray for the thing God wants them to pray for: just enough grace to see them through this moment, through this time of trouble.
Instead, we conjure up a vision of the future we want and appeal for that outcome. We persist in wrapping our anxious hands around life’s steering wheel as if it’s going to work this time if only we clutch it more tightly. The most difficult prayer for us to voice is, “Not my will, but Thine, be done.”
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