Yancey and Prayer:

Yancey wrote the book Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference about a year ago, so I know this post is somewhat dated. I read through most of the book shortly after it came out. It is on the bookshelf with about 5 or 6 other Yancey books....just a few feet from where I am sitting. Yesterday, while surfing, (dang, I did a LOT of surfing this weekend) I came across some excerpts on Google Books that caught my attention. I thought a post or two about the book (quotes from it and comments about it) might fit nicely with some recent discussions about prayer. Since a quote of Yancey's was the subject of yesterday's post about the OT, he was probably in my thoughts. He does have some deep, insightful things to say about prayer so I think a post or two about the book would be appropriate. I did, afterall, write a post about C.S. Lewis and his views about prayer, so this is quite a bit more current. Yancey has the same heart wrenching questions and doubts all the rest of us have. In an interview On the Faithful Reader web site he was asked:

What made you decide to write a book about prayer?

He replied:

I could give a lot of answers, but the honest one is that I felt so inadequate in my life of prayer. As I talked with other Christians I realized that I’m not alone. We have this enormous privilege of communicating with the Lord of the universe, and yet we struggle mightily. I began with a list of questions, my questions. Why are some prayers answered and others not? Why do I sometimes hit a wall of God’s silence? Does it matter whether ten or a hundred people pray for someone’s healing? Does prayer change God or change us? Why tell God something God already knows? These seemed to point to the question in the book’s subtitle: Does prayer make any difference?

Later in the interview he was asked:

At what point do you find you have no answers and have to rely on trust or faith about prayer?

At almost every point, frankly. I can never resolve the mystery of prayer. Why didn’t God intervene at Auschwitz, and in view of that how can I expect God to intervene with the relatively unimportant matters of my life? I don’t think anyone can answer those questions. In essence, prayer is a declaration of trust. Jesus gave us the model in Gethsemane, his prayer moving from “Take this cup away” to “Not my will but yours be done.” Alone, his friends asleep, surrounded by enemies on an alien planet, he too sensed some of the alienation and desperation we sometimes feel as we pray.

He went on to say:

I would go back to the disjunction between God’s reluctance to intervene in big things (like Auschwitz) and the Bible’s exhortation for us to pray for small things. I can’t put those two together.

I can so relate. My next few posts will be about quotes and excerpts from this book...