You Are Not Alone If You Struggle With Praying
Encouragement from a legend in the faith on dealing with difficulty praying
Do you struggle in praying?
You’re not the only one, I have also, and if we’re honest, we all do somehow. Asking for things comes naturally to us—from people, anyway. But asking from God, our King and Father, usually doesn’t.
Even a legendary Christian storyteller did.
We are told by Dr. Art Lindsley, writing in C.S. Lewis on Prayer, that prayer was an important part of Lewis’s life, but that he had problems with praying. Much of his struggle came from his early life, for as a boy his mother died and his father then sent him to boarding school.
He tried to pray every night but developed what he called a “false conscience” about prayer. He had been told that it was not enough to say your prayers; you also had to think about what you were saying. As soon as he finished his prayers each night, he would ask himself, “Are you sure you were thinking about what you were saying?” The answer was inevitably no, writes Lindsley.
It wasn’t always this way.
Gradually his faith was restored and his prayer life became more robust and he was restored to a sense of closeness with God. Still, Lewis felt that prayer was not primarily something to talk about but something to “do.” We agree, it is more important to pray than to just talk about it.
Nothing teaches us more about prayer than actually praying!
To Lewis, prayer changes us from the inside out.
Since I have begun to pray, I find my extreme view of personality changing. My own empirical self is becoming more important, and this is exactly the opposite of self-love. You don’t teach a seed how to die into treehood by throwing it into the fire: and it has to become a good seed before it’s worth burying. - Letters of C. S. Lewis
In Petitionary Prayer: A Problem without an Answer, Lewis notes two patterns in prayer:
Type “A” is illustrated by Jesus in the Garden. “Thy will be done.”
Type “B” is the prayer of faith to “move mountains.”
In Gethsemane the holiest of all petitioners prayed three times that a certain cup might pass from Him. It did not. After that, the idea that prayer is recommended to us as a sort of infallible gimmick, is dismissed.”
In other words, we learn from Jesus that praying isn’t a magic formula, but one of faith and trust in the Father’s sovereign will.
Prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted. And if an infinitely wise Being listens to the requests of finite and foolish creatures, of course He will sometimes grant and sometimes refuse them.
C. S. Lewis
No matter why we struggle in praying, if we (a) make the decision to pray like we do any daily activity (exercise, laundry, working) and (b) commit to it, then we go a long way in overcoming the struggle.
When I first started to intercede, the church had three scheduled hours for prayer at the church. I committed to going at 6 a.m. before work. Knowing that a few others were expecting me to be there—and would track me down afterward if I wasn’t there, got me started and kept me going.
Just starting something is often the hard part. Once we get going, the way gets easier.
Let these be encouragements to us as we struggle with our own problems in prayer, and learn that for most of us the prayer in Gethsemane is the only model. Removing mountains can wait. - [Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer]
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I hear you, and that's worth a different article. There are those who act like they don't have to do anything. Our phrase has long been start on your knees and roll up your sleeves.
This article was to encourage the vast numbers in churchdom who struggle to pray a little, if at all. Hopefully it's a bit of help to them to not neglect it.
I think we can easily forget that action is ALWAYS the precursor to prayer. Too many people seem to think they can just sit around praying and God will do it all. Except for salvation, He won't.