TRH on Prayer No. 2: The 'Yes' May Never Come

by Laura Flanagan

What does it mean to pray really hard for something to which you may not ever hear “yes”?

Does that mean you’re praying for the wrong thing? Not necessarily. There are infinite paths to sainthood. There are multiple ways to follow Christ. It’s okay to prefer one path and ask for it. You just may not be given it. What then?

Here, I decided to number the steps I’ve gone through so far in that process, this hashing out of things with God. It’s a particular struggle that a lot of people face, and face for far longer than I have. (Editor's Note: Here's a previous reflection on her family from Laura.)

1. Pray for another child in your family, and not receive what you asked for.
2. Pray, and not receive again.
3. Feel like your body isn’t done with this work, and express that to God.
4. Not receive again.
5. Realize that this disappointment may continue for a long time, or may continue forever - so how do you keep this from becoming a disappointment in God? Or too painful, where you lose hope?

I knew I had to balance this with the hope that such joy might be. Our Lord always wants us to have hope. But it certainly feels more like “getting my hopes up,” leading to more intense disappointment or sorrow.

Gratitude is the key there, I tell myself. If we do not expect specific good things, we are more grateful when they make their appearance. And if we are grateful for both expected and unexpected joys, we are less likely to expect specific ones.

5.1 Strongly resist any temptation to feel like God owes you this.

Related to the above - this feels like progress from #5, but really isn’t. I was pretty confident that I didn’t feel like God owed me a “yes” to this intention. “I’ll love you, regardless, Lord, sure.” But I did feel a little bit like he owes my daughter. That’s the tough part of intercessory prayer - prayer for others. You’re not asking for good things for yourself, but for others. You’re turned outward, as you should be, instead of inward, solely focused your own needs and wants. And yet the answer may not be yes to others’ wants either, no matter how deserving they are.

That “little bit” of feeling Clare’s owed a sibling is probably just about me. I’m resisting the seemingly more difficult path of forming a child who doesn’t have the gift of siblings. I am not perfect, so to be responsible for a third of the love and witness she’s supposed to receive from her immediately family certainly makes me think that it would be better to have more family members to love her. And maybe it would be better - but “good enough” is enough for the Lord to work with in her heart and soul.

6. Consider whether God is calling you to foster care.
7. Discern “no” on the foster care question, and be pretty sure that answer is not subconsciously yours because you selfishly don’t want to do it. You actually kind of do want to do it - but recognize that it would not be best for you, for your family... right now.
8. Start figuring out that the only profitable thing to ask for is “better conformity to the will of God,” since you were investigating the will of God with the foster care thing.

All prayer should have the caveat, implicit or explicit - "but not my will, but yours be done.” Then we also have to mean it. We do not know how to pray as we ought, we may not know if we're praying for the exact right thing, but if we're open, the Holy Spirit can intercede for us in the appropriate way, and make us willing to accept what God does intend to give.

It can be terribly hard to mean it. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak - and “flesh” here can be your emotions, your mental state. You may know what the peace-filled, surrendering-to-God attitude would be in a situation, but you just can’t quite muster it. Sometimes you’re just angry or upset that you don’t have what you want. Sometimes you do just feel like God should give it to you.

9. Still cry out to God every so often.

This has a great precedent in the Psalms, which everyone should read and pray. Jesus quoted Psalm 22’s “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” from the cross, after all. When you're just telling the Lord that you miss your daughter, or that you wish your family were larger, all that is is bringing him into that sorrow. You’re already feeling the sorrow, and He's already there anyway - you're just consciously letting Him in.

Samwise Gamgee, stalwart companion to the Ringbearer in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, upon seeing the resurrected wizard Gandalf again, says, “Is everything sad going to come untrue? What’s happened to the world?” An Easter morning statement if there ever was one.

Everything sad will come untrue, indeed. But that doesn’t always change that it’s sad now, and there’s no guilt or shame to be found in that. “My son was dead, and is alive again,” as the father in the parable of the Prodigal Son explains. The son had been "dead." The father had sorrowed over that. He had prayed that the son might return - but didn’t have control over whether he would. That control belonged elsewhere.

Even if the Father is God and not a human father, as the parable intends, God too has placed himself in that humble, uncontrolling position through his gift of human freedom. He both wants for us life in abundance, and cannot not always prevent ill - that gift and that consequence are partnered until the eschaton.

The first of the “Eleven Addresses to the Lord” by poet John Berryman begins with gratitude for the wonder of creation, then continues,

I have made up a morning prayer to you
containing with precision everything that most matters.
“According to Thy will” the thing begins.
It took me off & on two days. It does not aim at eloquence.

“According to Thy will” I must learn to begin, always.

I recommend reading the rest of the poem. Near the end of this address, he allows for the possibility of great miracles, in which he solidly believes. The examples are those times when the risen Lord appeared to Peter and Paul, but Berryman considers those miracles to be perhaps a “special case to establish their initiatory faith.”

Not all of us can receive the special case.

So we have to return to “Thy will be done,” or the succinct prayer of Dag Hammarskjöld: “For all that has been — Thanks. For all that shall be — Yes.”