A pray-er's prayer

I’ve had a hard time praying the past couple weeks. It’s not that I doubt God’s presence, but I think it’s that I doubt how to pray or what to pray about or for in prayers of petition. I have no problem praying for forgiveness for X, Y and Z; nor do I have problems giving thanks for everything under the sun from coffee to friends. But when it comes to asking for something, I have a tendency to quantify.

How many minutes spent in prayer.

How many people are praying for the same thing.

How frequently I pray.

As if I spent a trillion minutes in prayer about something, it would be answered. Or if 100 people are praying for something, surely it’ll happen. Or if I pray 10 times a day for the same thing...

I play little mind games with myself, knowing full well, they won't "work" but I do 'em anyways. Maybe if I pray like THAT, or if I say THIS instead of that, or if I focus on THAT instead of THIS...

And then when something happens so against whatever it was I was praying for—as it did a couple weeks ago—I’m taken aback. I cry out, God, didn’t you hear me all those times? Didn’t you hear the other hundreds of people praying?

Not to discount the power of lots of people praying, but God hears the prayer of one little ole’ person as well as the prayer of thousands. He hears my two-second prayer as well as my two-hour prayer. He knows what I want even if I were to never ask for it in prayer. The power is in Him. Not me.

I remember reading Philip Yancey’s on prayer, creatively called Prayer. It’s great, and I highly recommend, but at the end, I said, well, Phil doesn’t know either. Prayer isn’t an exact science, and thus, unlike I had hoped, he doesn’t have all the answers. So just because X number of people are praying for Y to happen, doesn’t mean Y will happen. And just because A is super faithful and persistent about praying for B means that B will happen. But that doesn’t discount what we DO know.

That His ears are attentive to our prayer (1 Peter 3:12), that prayer is powerful and effective (James 5:16), and that we are to be faithful in prayer (Romans 12:12).