Unanswered Prayers
When we need help in our lives – what can we do?
The Christian says we can pray for God’s help. The nonbeliever says, “Forget it! God does not answer prayers because he isn’t there.” And we wonder if they are correct because in most instances the prayer seems to be unanswered. To drive home the point, we know that when we pray for miraculous healings 99.9897% of the time the requested healing didn’t occur. We may have petitioned Jesus for help in reliance upon his promise that whatever we ask for will be granted. But nothing happened, or if it did we just didn’t recognize his intervention. It was an unanswered prayer. The insidious cancer striking down our loved one continues to progress. I didn’t get that promotion; instead it went to that guy who we all know is a first-class phony with not nearly the knowledge of the company’s operations. The girl of my dreams left me for that creep in Texas.
The list of unanswered prayers is endless. The upshot is that when prayers are answered the intervening hand of Jesus is quite often ignored, soon forgotten or explained away as a non-miracle since the prayed for result would have happened anyway. In other words, even when a prayer is answered, or appears to be answered, God is often shortly thereafter forgotten.
Drawing closer to God
The irony is that while pain, sense of loss, remorse, uncertainty, humiliation, fear all reduce us to the horror of suffering, it is when we suffer that we turn to God most often and with the greatest intensity. It is then that we try to draw closer to Jesus. It is then that we most seek his presence and help. Perhaps that is why Jesus told us how difficult it is for a rich man to enter his kingdom. A self-satisfied, self-congratulatory arrogance quite often accompanies riches. Suffering, on the other hand, is an opportunity to grow in faith and in our love for God. So, and as difficult as it may be to accept, perhaps unanswered prayers aren’t so bad after all.
We need to regroup and understand that the deepest level of our prayers should be to thank God for his creation, our lives, and the gift of Jesus and Mary’s acceptance to become the mother of our Saving Grace. Only when we recognize and acknowledge God’s love should we present our petitions, and then always with the caveat that his will be done. Our job then becomes to trust Jesus. Above all, our prayer should always be, first and foremost, for the Holy Spirit. This prayer will always be answered because the will of God is for us to live in his presence and for his presence to be within us. Jesus’ kingdom is not of this world, and he makes himself available with a richness beyond comprehension if we merely ask for it and open our heart. He is waiting to enter.
Trusting God
Bernadette tells us that when Our Lady of Lourdes received requests for miraculous healings, some she accepted, and some she did not. This tells us that even when we have a direct pipeline to Jesus, so to speak, our suffering may not be alleviated. We may struggle and have issues of pain and sickness and we pray and pray for relief, but nothing seems to happen. We must never forget that Jesus is seeking our eternal soul. For some reason, the relief from our suffering is not deemed conducive to Jesus’ objective – and ours. Farther along we’ll understand, but not right now. We must simply trust that whatever God permits to happen to us or our loved ones, or others, is permitted for our eternal salvation. Be not Afraid.
For example, God allowed his son to suffer and die on the cross. We call this Good Friday because the cross told us victory over death was available to each of us. Perhaps God permits us to suffer so that we can draw closer to the cross of Jesus and achieve our victory over death. Despite our sufferings we can never say to God that he doesn’t know what our suffering is like because, as explained in The Savior’s Incredible Love, he does. Jesus never promised us freedom from suffering. What he promised us was our resurrection and life eternal with him.
Let’s see if a dog can shed more light on the apparent dilemma confronting us when we try to confront God’s unconditional love with our suffering.
A dog lives in the present. What happened a week ago has no meaning except as to how the experience prepares him for a future response to a similar situation. The world as it will exist five months from now, five weeks from now or five minutes from now is of no consequence, of no concern and does not exist in his mind. What exists is what is happening now. He does not get the big picture.
The pain he feels as the veterinarian performs a procedure to restore his well-being is very real, but temporary. He doesn’t know what’s going to happen next, but as long as you’re beside him he knows it’s going to be ok. Your dog trusts you even though he can’t possibly understand. And you love him all the more because of his trust. Your mission is to take care of him.
Our relationship with Jesus and our lives bear a deep similarity. We need to recognize that our perspective of reality is but an infinitesimal segment of eternity. Compare our suffering of ten minutes, ten years, or a lifetime with Jesus’ promised eternity of happiness in a place of love beyond or earthly ability to comprehend. The essence of Christianity is trusting God.
Imagine a pane of opaque glass one mile high and one mile wide. Now imagine a clear spot the size of a pin prick in the lower left-hand corner. That’s how much we know about God. He is the creator of all that is seen and unseen, of all that is visible and invisible, of the tiniest microbe as well as the complex complementary living cells within it, and of the most ferocious and magnificent galaxies billions of light years distant. And you think you should understand why we suffer and that no loving God could ever permit evil as we interpret it to roam our world! And you think you can see the relationship of all that has gone before, goes on today, and all future events and creation! And you think you could put all of time and eternity and all creation together in way superior to what God has done! And you think God needs to prove himself by directly answering prayers to your satisfaction!
Give it a rest!
Suffering as a test
Is our suffering nothing more than a test from God? Someday we’ll know, but in the meantime, we can follow the example set by Jesus the Christ: Never waiver and try always to remain in the presence of God through prayer. Our job is to try and ascertain and follow the will of God. We must do our best to follow his commandments, whatever the cost.
Just when you think you’ve reached the end of the rope in terms of what’s happening in your life, meditation on the Lord’s Passion will help you understand that the sufferings of the present time are nothing compared to the glory to be revealed for us (Romans 8:18). The sacred song, Farther Along, reminds us of this. The Agony in the Garden! Scourging! Crowning! The Way of the Cross! Nailed to a Cross! How much agony and torment can one man take? How much pain and injustice can we take? And through our own travails, we need to have faith that farther along everything will finally make sense. And it will. Jesus told us as much when the sorrow of his Passion was superseded and trumped with the glory of his Resurrection and Ascension. Farther along we’ll know all about it.
The end of the world
C.S. Lewis provides compelling insight into the world of Christianity. In Mere Christianity (page 65; see Resources) he reminds us of something that always slips our mind.:
“I wonder whether people who ask God to interfere openly and directly in our world quite realise what it will be like when he does. When that happens, it is the end of the world. . . .[B]ut what is the good of saying you are on His side then, when you see the whole natural universe melting away like a dream and something else – something it never entered your head to conceive – comes crashing in; something so beautiful to some of us and so terrible to others that none of us will have any choice left? For this time it will be God without disguise; something so overwhelming that it will strike either irresistible love or irresistible horror into every creature. It will be too late then to choose your side. . . . Now, today, this moment is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last for ever. We must take it or leave it.”
If you have chosen the side that will be overwhelmed with agonizing and eternal distress once God reveals himself, you may want to reconsider.
God tells us he understands
Don’t dance away from the issue by telling us that there is no God because of unanswered prayers. We must never forget that when Jesus took upon himself the human condition he became subject to the same emotions and feelings we have. He became angry; he felt sorrow; he was subject to the same pain and suffering that we are. His life tells us that he understands.
That brings us to the events of that first Good Friday weekend and his brutal execution and the excruciating anguish and pain he suffered. Consequently, when you suffer or see others suffer, and prayers appear to be unanswered, don’t conclude that we’ve been abandoned or that God is just a myth. Whatever your circumstance God knows about it and understands. He set it up so that we cannot emerge from the back door of this life without suffering or without causing others to suffer (perhaps just the mere fact that we die and leave grieving loved ones). But what he desires is your ultimate triumph, just as Jesus triumphed on that first Easter Sunday. Perhaps your prayers are being answered, but you just don’t know it – at least for right now.
God made us so that we could choose to spend eternity with him. To reach the finish line we have to trust him. We have a choice. When we suffer we can trust him and accept that his will is for our benefit, or we can curse or ignore him. When we do the latter, we in effect are saying that we and not he should be the captain of our ship.
Alexandrina da Costa of Balasar
Because we can only see a slice of eternity we can’t know what has gone before or what is yet to come. Our myopic vision is compounded by the fact that God is and must, of necessity, be incomprehensible. Nevertheless, he has spoken to us in deed and language which proves he understands and loves us with a powerful enduring love. When we recognize and accept his demonstrated love, then we can begin to understand why we have unanswered prayers. Through it all we need to remain faithful, just as Alexandrina da Costa of Balasar did.
Some related pages, websites, and references
Footnotes and Attributions
Photograph of anxious dog at veterinarian’s office retrieved from the The Meta Picture website.
Last modified December 18, 2019