Grosey's Messages

You don’t need to have been a Christian for very long to run into the challenge of prayers feeling as if they are bouncing off the ceiling. So if you’re wrestling with this question, you’re not alone. The famous Christian writer C. S. Lewis said that unanswered prayer, especially as he prayed for his sick and dying mother as a boy, was one reason he abandoned faith until his 30s. Lewis wrote:

The trouble with God is that he is like a person who never acknowledges one’s letters and so, in time, one comes to the conclusion either that he does not exist or that you have got the address wrong.¹

At this point it’s easy for atheists to scoff and say “I told you so!” but the challenge is there’s no solace in secularism. If atheism is true, there is no God to be silent, but worse than that, the universe is utterly impassive and entirely doesn’t care. And when suffering comes, or you see injustice, or when life feels unfair, well suck it up: if atheism is true, we live in a world where evil prospers, the strong flourish at the expense of the weak, and one day everything ends in the heat death of the universe.

If prayer isn’t real, if God doesn’t exist, that wouldn’t be some kind of triumphal win for atheism, but rather the bleak and depressing recognition that humans are, as atheist cosmologist Lawrence M. Krauss put it, “a 1% bit of pollution in the universe”.² Maybe the very fact that we recoil at that suggestion is itself a clue that we are more than just cosmic debris, and that the spiritual instinct most humans find within themselves is a clue to a bigger story.

For Christians, that bigger story is centred around the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus—the Bible repeatedly proclaiming that if you want to know what God is like, then look at Jesus. And in the one and only prayer that he taught his followers to pray, the words we know today as The Lord’s Prayer, Jesus emphasised that God is relational. “Want to know how to pray?” said Jesus.“Well, start like this: ‘Our Father in heaven’”. No other religion makes the bold claim that you can pray to the very Lord and Creator of the universe using such relational language as this.

But it’s that deeply relational quality to Christian prayer that can make it feel very tough if it seems that our prayers are going unanswered. If God were simply a distant, remote PO box number to whom we sent our missives with no expectation of any response, we might be able to shrug our shoulders and say “Well, what did you expect?” But that’s not the God of the Christian faith, the God who revealed himself in Jesus, and thus we can feel abandoned, or forgotten, or just plain baffled when we think our prayers have been ignored.