Unanswered Prayer
The prayers go up and up and up. Why does an old widow receive healing, but a young mother dies? Why are some temptations resisted and others not? Why, when the people do everything right and pray constantly on their knees, does their church remain small and weak?
Sometimes we can come up with answers that make a certain amount of sense. Other times, we can’t. Sometimes it might help to ask ourselves, what if God answered every prayer?
If you’ve been around a while, you’ve probably figured out that we all kind of have a tendency toward selfishness. Of course, that translates into our prayers. The late Erma Bombeck used to pray, “If you can’t make me look thin, make my friends look fat.”
If prayer is a means of getting what we want, then we already answer a lot of our own prayers. We push the pedal, run red lights, speed through residential areas. We buy a lot of expensive junk. We overeat, smoke, and drink, ruining our health. We run ourselves ragged, dragging our children with us. We harbor resentment, hold grudges, curse people. Wars, genocide, pollution, unjust systems; some have more money than they can spend in three lifetimes. Others can barely come up with one meal a day. Mankind hasn’t exactly handled the power it has very well. What if God answered every prayer? In essence, He’d be turning the world over to us to run. You don’t have to be a deep thinker to figure out where that would lead!
Maybe this was what Garth Brooks was getting at when he wrote this song, “Just because he doesn’t answer doesn’t mean he don’t care. Some of God’s greatest gifts are unanswered prayers.”
