I’d guess maybe 20 percent of my prayers get anything like the answer I want. Over time, I give up. I pray for those things I believe will happen. Or I just don’t pray. I review my journal and see God doing less and less. I get mad. Like a child, I stop talking. I’m passive-aggressive with God. I put him off. Maybe later.

The words of Joanne from Philip Yancey’s book Prayer: Does it Make Any Difference?

I cited this in a previous blog titled Do You Pray. I think that most people do not pray about their daily work because they do not believe that it will be effective. If they did think that God would answer their prayers, they would certainly be accessing that source of power in order to have more work success. And they have arrived at this conclusion because of their experience. This may sound unspiritual, but when we really start to pray about our daily lives, asking God for our needs and desires, the majority of those prayers are not going to get anything like the answer that we want.

Think about how you would pray about a given work day or work week if you really believed that what you asked God for would happen. Wouldn’t you consider every aspect of your day and ask that it be wildly successful? Wouldn’t you ask for difficulties and hindrances to disappear? And how many of those requests would be granted in any given day or week? Not many, and on some days and weeks, none at all. So I can understand why people stop praying.

Yet, we are called to pray, and pray about everything (Phil: 4:6). So how are we to obey Jesus and “always to pray and not lose heart (Luke 18:1)”? Clearly we cannot have our motivation rest on our prayers being answered because that does not happen often enough to cause us to pray. If it did, we would not have any problem praying about everything.

I have recently begun a practice of starting each day thinking of the day and what I would want God to do in that day. I then revisit the list the next day and determine whether or not I experienced God granting that request. So far, most of the requests are not granted. But that does not surprise or discourage me because I am asking for a lot of things that require God to do something that would qualify as a significant act on His part. These are not requests that a skeptic could easily say would have happened whether God answered the prayer or not. For example, I pray for healing of medical conditions that are not dire, but do afflict our family (my back, Kristin’s cancer medicine side effects, Ben’s sports injury, etc.) I pray that God would heal on that day, and none of those requests have been granted yet. Or I pray for a sense of special inspiration while working on a blog or meeting with a client. I do not just pray that “it would go well.”

The point of this exercise is not to generate a list of answered prayers that motivate me to pray more. Nor is it to generate a list of unanswered prayers that I can use to accuse God of being unresponsive. It is to pray about those things that concern me. I do not want to neglect praying about them because I have given up on prayer making any difference. It is to talk with God about them and express my heart. I offer them as an opportunity for Him to act in my life if He chooses. But He does not have to act. I feel like I am being responsive to His desire to have me pray about what is on my heart , even though He is not granting those requests on a consistent basis.

So these prayers express my relationship with a God who is with me and cares about me and my life. They are prayers of faith and trust in God. I imagine that these prayers are pleasing to Him and He delights in the fact that I am relating with Him about them. I imagine that He wants us to pray about our work days like this.

And as we pray about all things, I believe that we are practicing the kind of faith that somehow enables God to work more in answered prayer. That was a factor for Jesus in Nazareth as recorded in Mark 6, And he could do no mighty work there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and healed them. And he marveled because of their unbelief. We do not want God’s ability to act in our place of work to be hindered by our unbelief. And not praying about the details of our work day could be an expression of unbelief.

I would love to connect with you about these posts if they have stirred any thoughts or questions. Take a minute, shoot me an email at bo@leavenedlives.org, and let’s see where that takes us.