You know what has been the most common response to my de-conversion from Christian friends, family and colleagues?
“I will pray for you”
I have not heard this ten times, or twenty, but I guess at least a hundred times. Some even said that other groups, with people I don’t know at all, were praying for me! Maybe you have been praying for me. Maybe you are still praying for me every time you see another one of these blog posts come by. If you are my parents, probably every day.
Let me start off by saying I know you do this with the best of intentions, and I like that. I see that. You wish me well, you wish me an eternal life, you wish me the joy that Jesus or God brings into your life. Thank you.
But the story doesn’t end here. What happened behind the scenes is that I took all this prayer as a final test of the existence of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. What if He is there after all, and Christians are right, then surely these 100+ people praying for me should have some effect on me. Surely God would finally show up from behind the curtains in some unexpected way, even if it was only for a second or two. I always kept my doubts to myself. This amount of prayer has never happened before!
So what happened, after all these prayers?
Well… nothing. I only lost my faith even more, and became more and more assured that Christianity was pulling the short rope, despite a lot of searching around.
Why? Why does this happen? What are the effects of prayer? What am I missing? Help me out here.
The Trust Based Relation
As I blogged earlier, faith in God is mostly a trust based relationship. Prayer is then the same as asking your all-powerful and all-loving father to do something for you or someone else and trust that it will all work out for good, in Romans 8 style (I know there are more types of prayer, like meditative prayer, but let’s keep those aside for now). I, for one, used to have a rock-solid faith that God would hear my prayers, and they would somehow have some effect.
But if we zoom in to the effect that prayer has, and especially those hundreds of prayers that have been said on behalf of my lack of faith, what results do we actually expect? And what is the apparent lack of an answer from God (until now) telling us?
I realise that this is a forbidden terrain for most Christians: “We can’t tell what God has to do with our prayers, after all, ‘He is not a tame lion’. God is no magic juke-box with predefined results”. Okay, fair enough. But certainly we should still be able to think about the effects of our prayers, right? What is going on in the mind of God as He is not hearing our prayers? What is the nature of prayer at all? We can’t keep saying “it’s a mystery, just trust God” while we see that prayer sorts out no effect, even not a tiny bit on a large scale.
So let’s take my case, as an example, or substitute any other unheard prayer for the conversion of a non-Christian. What possible scenarios can we identify, and what does each one tell us about prayer and what about God? Please tell me if I missed one!
The Scenarios for Your Prayers for my Rededication to Christ
- Yes, God heard your prayer and He wants it, so the wish is granted and I start to believe again because God revealed Himself to me. Or I received the wisdom. Or broke with my sins of doubting. That is what you are all praying for, I assume. One problem: it didn’t happen.
- Yes, God wants it, but I’m resisting. That’s assuming I can even resist God, which is a debate on it’s own. Plus, I don’t see a clear revelation from God either. No Damascus road experience at all for me. Besides, if I can resist God despite Him wanting me to believe, then your prayers can’t add anything at all. They don’t have power in themselves, they just ask God something to do. If even God can’t do it because of my free will, I am doomed and you are praying in vain.
- No, God does not want my salvation, period. Yikes! Then why would He write that anyone who seeks Him earnestly will find Him (Heb 11:6)? Why would He then say that He wants everyone to be saved (1 Tim 2:4)? Why die “for the whole world” (John 3:16)? Why let a missionary slip away for the grand ‘sin’ of asking tough questions? Plus: why would God let you pray on end for something He does not want to happen anyway? Couldn’t He rather tell you to put your prayer focus somewhere else? In this case, prayer is ineffective and God is simply a tyrant who hates my guts for all eternity, despite my attempts to believe.
- God does not want my salvation, unless you change His mind. So I am like Sodom and Gomorra, and you are Abraham, negotiating with God for my eternal life or destruction. Or you are like the widow who comes to the king every day begging for a favour, until the king gets so tired of the widow that he grants her the request.
But isn’t that odd? Didn’t God say that He wants my salvation anyway? Did Jesus die on the cross for the sins of the whole world, but then it is up to us to convince God that He should do some trouble in reaching the world with this message?
So perhaps in this scenario your prayers are somewhat useful, but it makes God into a bully who hates me, and you need to change his mind or I face eternal destruction. Wow. What a responsibility! And what a non-loving God, who apparently loves me less than all of you who pray for me! - God wants my salvation, and He is going to do it, He just wants you to ask. Okay, so God is like a father who promises a cookie, writes it down in a big book for all the world to read, but then wants people to first beg him hundreds of times before they actually get the cookie? Oh, and no guarantee how many times you need to beg? Maybe you even never get the cookie? What sort of promise is that? What kind of real world scenario would make the father look like a good person if literally a hundred children have to ask him, for years on end, before He is going to do anything at all that He wanted to do in the first place? This way, your prayers don’t have an effect in and of themselves, they are just a way to please God. This makes God a rather unpleasant person with emotional insecurity issues (I’m not mocking, I am serious!)
- God will do it, but the time is not ripe yet. I can understand this one, in the grand majestic view of time that God would have. But if this is the case, why let your children plead and beg in the meantime? Why not tell the people who are praying: look, I will do it, but it’s going to take a little time for a strategic moment to arrive? It’s kind of sadistic to have people pray for years, while all the while you know it is going to happen anyway. Remember: the God of the Bible is not mute, He should actually be able to speak. Your prayers are actuallly pointless in this case.
- I don’t know, God just wants us to plead to Him for anything that is on our hearts. You are on my heart. Why don’t you respect those prayers and see the love behind it? Seriously, it is great that people care enough about me to really plead for me. But as I am trying to discern myself where God is to be found, and if prayers have any effect, then these kinds of answers only reinforce that there is no critical thought process going on, and God does not need to exist at all for you to continue your prayers. You just ‘have faith’. That may sound great, but it vaporises under scrutiny into thin air. So I’m sorry, this option is not a real answer.
Further Away From God
In the end, each and every promise of prayer has driven me further away from God. Because each and every prayer was confirming one of the following:
- God didn’t care about me to ‘save’ me (yet), despite the many prayers, which is cruel and contrary to Scripture.
- Or God is waiting for something to happen, but lets His children just plead pointlessly in the meantime, which is also cruel and a waste of time.
- Or God is not the God of the Bible and does not listen to any of your prayers.
- Or God does not exist at all.
I don’t see any other rational options. Do you?
February 15, 2016 at 22:30
other than that there is no god? nope
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February 21, 2016 at 21:45
Sure, there are many other options, most of them hidden under false assumptions in your statements.
1. That God does not save you, does not prove that he does not care about you. Jesus loved the rich young ruler who left Him (Mark 10:21), yet there is no indication He saved him.
2. God is not cruel to you in not answering the prayers. You do not want to belong to God, so there is nothing to complain about.
3. God is not cruel to us in not answering our prayers. As this world is not centered around you, there is a lot God may want to accomplish (e.g. in us) through praying for you besides converting you.
4. Not answering our prayers is not contrary to Scripture. There is no promise anywhere in the Bible that we can change people’s convictions through our prayer. If you laboured under that misconception you saw other people as puppets on your string, and God as your instrument. That is magic, not Christianity.
5. If our prayers are not answered, or not answered right away, that does not mean it is pleading pointlessly. Prayer is the breath of the soul. It is natural, good, and healthy. If not for you, then for us.
6. Unanswered prayer is a waste of time if you see God as a vending machine and prayer as a nickel. ‘Pouring out your soul before the Lord’ (see 1 Samuel 1:15) is a better way to look at it. So congratulations! You have found out God is not the machine you took Him for. That is step one to becoming a Christian. Step two is finding out He is a person incredibly more complicated, bewildering, amazing, and surprising than you can imagine or understand. You’re halfway there.
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February 26, 2016 at 20:12
Thanks for your reply. let met handle it point by point as well:
1. Your point is my point 2 in different words. God loves me, but He is unable to do anything with peoples’ prayers because I would resist.
2. I don’t want to belong to God? Where did you get that idea? I am eager for truth, and if God is real, I am more than happy to sell all my belongings and follow Him. His utter silence on the other hand speaks volumes.
3. A nice rationalisation why nothing happens, but it does not relate to how real life works. There is real suffering in some people who see me without faith, and God is not giving them clear guidance either. That is just plain cruel in my book, the positive side effects you are referring to (patience I guess?) are hardly a match for that. No father would let his children walk around with a broken arm, while they beg him to do something about the pain, while he is silent for years to teach them ‘patience’ or some other virtues. Really does not fly.
4. I did not have that misconception. But it was weird why we would pray at all for something God wants to do anyway, according to Scripture. Why would you pray *at all* for people to come to know the Lord? Does God really need to be reminded of his own mission?
5. I know how it feels great, I have been there, done that. And because we have been trained to never question God (like you said before, I am becoming God’s god) we usually don’t zoom out to see the whole picture of us praying and God not answering. That is what this whole blog is about: zooming out of the invidual perspective to see what is going on.
6. I know that prayer is much more than asking God for stuff, like I wrote in this blog as well. But it is *also* asking God for things, and Gods silence speaks volumes to me now.
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February 25, 2016 at 21:57
struck by the pain that is hidden in this message…
but also; impressed by your blogs, the way you look into this in depth and length… It really had your heart.
My ‘way out’ was a walk-away for over 15 years…. It wasn’t right away. I applied to bible schools but always ran out just before I got started. I wanted to go to the mission field but stopped pushing the dream for other opportunities. I did not have a catharsis either way. But I did loose my faith. I don’t have the length and depth in thoughts or words, but you put many of my thoughts in words.
I went to a very depressing time when in univ. God was not close at all and my experiences I once thought were god given left me with nothing but silence. I did not wish to marry and wanted another way of living. then, in the streets of Chiang Mai, I kind of had a ‘word of the lord’ that he desired me to have a family as a witness of harmony. So that made me push to that situation. hazards, pain and disaster and many years later, I had a family which has caused pain, trouble, much loss, a divorce and a broken identity which was never alowed to be. because of faith and religion, I could not develop who really was… ME…. I was broken not whole, in pain not healed, abandoned not taken in….
I start a new way and developing new strategies..
my christian friends (which aren’t much anymore over the yrs) are texting me they pray for me.
I feel that sometimes I have been seriously traumatized by christianity and healing has never been set in. Now, free, I can explore who I really am. But with a grief of loss….
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June 14, 2016 at 22:39
Hi, saying that you will pray for someone is rude and not very nice. Listen to this fragment to find out why: https://youtu.be/WllnphTHOnU?t=33m15s
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