The Fear of Prayer

What!!??? How can you be afraid of prayer? Is that possible? Yes, it is. I know, because I’ve been afraid of it for a very long time.

When I was 17 years old, I asked God to make things better. The summer before my senior year, I was painfully shoved into adulthood by a car accident. Before I knew it, I was a caregiver for a brain-damaged mother who barely remembered who I was and a bitter grandfather who was struggling with cancer and wounded pride. Days were filled with nurses, needles, housekeeping and a teenager trying to manage it all. Needless to say I was overwhelmed. So I went to God.

I begged him to fix my situation. I pleaded with him to make things normal again. But literally, minutes after I got up off my knees, another crisis blew up in the house. This one nearly cost me my life at the hands of my own mother. Had God heard me? Was he ignoring me? Did he care about all those tears I had shed only minutes before? Now, I was broken. That moment planted the seed of doubt in the power of prayer.

It was enough to make me believe a lie that says when you pray, things only get worse.

A good lie is always founded in some truth. There’s only one word that turned what I believed into a lie. The word is only. The truth is, sometimes when you pray, things do get worse. What noone ever taught me was when things get worse, it is a strategy. Satan hears our prayers too. His strategy is to make us believe that talking to God does not work. And, on some level, I bought it. From that point on, I was deeply afraid to ask God for anything significant. I was afraid of how bad, things could get. The truth is, no matter how bad things get, God will always get good out of it. The challenge is to believe past the fear…to believe the truth.

This video captures this principle through a powerful song that has encouraged me and scriptures throughout, that I encourage you to write down and meditate on.