Sometimes life is good and faith is easy. Choose your image: the seas of your life are calm… the components of your life are gently falling into place… the people around you are agreeable and kind.
But sometimes life doesn’t make sense and faith is tough. Things happen (or a single BIG thing happens) that (choose your image): knocks you off your feet… causes you to cry out, “No! No!”… raises the nagging question, “How could a good God allow This Terrible Thing to happen?” This is a prayer for times like that.
Prayer for When Life Doesn’t Make Sense
I don’t get it, God… I just don’t understand… And I WANT to under-stand… I NEED to understand.
Just explain it to me. Help me to see how This Thing makes sense. I think I could accept it if it somehow made sense. If it was logical… fair… reasonable. If I could see a PURPOSE in it. Or, better yet, if I could see some GOOD in it… Some GOOD that This Thing will bring about… Some GOOD that outweighs the bad I can only see now… Some GOOD that makes This Thing not only understand-able, but acceptable.
I’m hanging on, God. I’m hanging on to the end of a branch, and I’m pretty high up in the tree too… (Or) I’m clinging to my cap-sized canoe and being tossed up and down by the waves… (Or) I’m reciting, “The Lord is my shepherd the Lord is my shepherd the Lord is my shepherd,” words that used to give me comfort but now seem empty.
All I have left right now, God, is faith. Pure faith. Or (more accu-rately) all I have left right now is my trust in you… in your wisdom… your goodness… your love. I’m trying to trust in you, God, but frankly, my trust is wearing thin. Very thin. So thin I sometimes wonder if it exists at all.
So, here I am, God, begging, as I sometimes must do. I’m begging you to help me. Help me to hang on. Give me the strength to face This Thing… to deal with This Thing… to endure This Thing. And give me direction. Help me to see what This Thing might mean for me… what it might be asking of me… what it might be calling me to do. As I ask for these things, I am thinking of Jesus, your Son.
For in Gethsemane, Jesus, too, faced a BIG Thing that made no sense… that knocked him to his knees: his looming death by horrific crucifixion. It was there among the old, gnarled olive trees that he uttered words that I imagine were similar to the words I am crying now: “Not this, God!… Not this!… Anything but this!” Jesus begged you, his Father, “Let this cup pass from me.” But then he added those words I am trying to make my own: “Not as I will, but as you will” (Matthew 26:39)… Jesus was clinging to the only thing he had left: his unconditional trust in you. Because his trust in you was so deep, he could cry out with a loud voice even while hanging on the cross, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46).
Loving God, I beg you now. Help me to make Jesus’
words my own. Help me to believe This Thing is in your
hands… and so am I… and so are all of us. Amen.
Excerpted from Sunflower Seeds of Hope, by Melannie Svoboda, SND. ©2024 by Melannie Svoboda, SND. Published by Twenty-Third Publications. Used with permission. All rights reserved.
