If prayer works, why doesn’t it work for everyone?
This was a question I was asked recently by someone very close to my heart who has been going through a lot of their own pain and struggles in the past few years. I too have wondered this myself a number of times over the last bunch of years. But I think the real question being asked here is better worded like this…
Why do some prayers get answered while others don’t?
This is such a tough question to ponder. Even the greatest spiritual beings in history have had trouble with resolving it. While I can’t say I have the exact answer either, maybe I can best respond like this.
I have struggled with mental, emotional, and physical pain for years now. When it first began I prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed for it to end and to return to a much better state of health. When those prayers went unanswered over the course of days, weeks, months, and then eventually years, I began to question my faith and wonder if God even existed. Was anyone even hearing all my prayers? Was anyone out there even listening to any of my tear-soaked words?
At first I was angry and wanted to rebel. I wanted to be resentful at God for letting this happen to me. But over time, something changed. My heart opened. And through that, I began to see all my pain and suffering from a totally different perspective. I realized that if my prayers had been answered years ago I would have never gained the gratitude I have in life for even the smallest of things like I do now. I also wouldn’t have seen that God exists in everyone and everything like I do now. But even more importantly than that, I would never have had my faith as much as it has through all of this. And most likely, if my prayers for healing had been answered long ago, there’s a strong likelihood I would have returned to my life of addictions, because that’s all I ever knew.
Sitting still and waiting on God, praying day in and day out for a brighter day has definitely not been an easy thing to do. Especially when my ego has screamed and screamed and screamed at me, trying to take control saying there must be a better way. Unfortunately, the last time I allowed it to convince me of that, I found myself in a much-worse state that I already was and became heavily medicated just to exist.
So while my prayers for better health haven’t been answered yet, something else has. God has provided me with an abundance of food, water, shelter, clothing, and companionship to keep me going. That’s a lot to be said compared to the millions and millions of people in this world who don’t have one or more of those things on any given day. Seeing that from this perspective helped me to alter my prayers along the way, as now I just ask for the strength to endure until God delivers me into a brighter day. And occasionally I’ve gotten glimpses of that in various ways, ever reminding me that something beyond my comprehension is hearing my prayers and working on my behalf.
In all honesty, looking back, I’m kind of glad that my prayers weren’t answered in the way I wanted because it only would have satisfied my ego and not my soul. And the last thing I want to satisfy is my ego on any level right now, as it’s my ego that has always been the one that has led me to ask those questions of why do some prayers go unanswered. It’s my ego that has always tried to convince me that when my prayers aren’t answered in the way it wants, that God must not exist. It’s my ego that’s always tried to convince me that if God was all-loving, then why would God let bad things happen to me. And the more I’ve listen to my ego, the more I’ve lived in anger, resentment, and frustration, the more I’ve blamed God for everything, and the more I’ve questioned whether it’s even worth it to pray or not. Being in that place did nothing good for me and only left me feeling empty and alone, so that’s why I continue to pray and believe my prayers are still being answered.
So why doesn’t prayer work for everyone and why do some prayers go unanswered?
My answer is simple. I believe it’s the ego that says prayer doesn’t work and it’s the ego that makes one think their prayers aren’t getting answered. If we could just get out of our own way and thinking, we might see that something greater is at work in our lives, that our prayers are being answered, and that it’s probably being done in a fashion far better than anything we could ever have imagined for ourselves…
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson
The broader problem is that often the culture around us worships the self — The Great and Mighty Me. If I don’t get what I want, when I want it, then pooey on God because he must not exist. Otherwise, he’d see how awesome I am and that I deserve what I’m asking for.
It’s the “Gumball Mentality” of prayer. God is a gumball machine, and my prayers are quarters and my “good life” is the crank. I put in the quarter, live my “good life,” and then the gumball (answer to prayer) comes out. Such a black-and-white, mechanistic way of thinking.
God is a person, and as such he doesn’t follow the rules of a machine. You can’t just do something and expect the same result every single time. I’m convinced this is why experiments testing the efficacy of prayer fail every time. They are designed to test a process or find a pattern; an intelligent being with a will isn’t necessarily going to adhere to the parameters we expect.
And you hit the last problem right on the head — that blasted ego that gets in the way of our seeking after God and desiring not his will, but our own.
Your experience, by the way, matches mine. Looking back on whatever prayers in my life weren’t answered, I find I’m the better for a lack of answer than a positive response. I’m glad God shaped my life the way he did, and sometimes I can’t believe that he didn’t just give up on this sinner. And the best part is that he isn’t done yet, so long as I fight my ego and accept what his hands mold instead of trying to fight back and create something different myself. I’ve done the latter and it didn’t work out so well.
Great comments Cory. You summed up it up all quite nicely. Thanks for reading my blog my friend! 🙂
You’re welcome! You are very insightful and I usually like what posts I read, even if I don’t always comment.