Praying Small Prayers

I am always in the habit of promising to pray for people. I say it all the time, “I am so so sorry about what you’re facing. I will pray.” And people I know and love say it to me often as well, “I am praying for you.” It’s a thing that a Christian says, and—here is the kicker—does, just as much as anything else, like reading the Bible or hauling her miserable over-fed, common-cold-addled bulk out of bed to go to church at 7:30 in the morning. It’s the thing that the Christian does lest he, or she, run out of spiritual oxygen.

But I wouldn’t be entirely truthful if I didn’t admit that there’s a lot of guilt that mingles itself into a life of prayer. You pray a lot, but you also promise to pray a lot, and, moreover, you are asked to pray for troubles that are not right in front of your own nose. So when you say, “Yes, I’m praying,” it’s not humanly possible for you to remember and keep all your promises. And if you’re a good Christian, by which I mean that you talk to other people and worry a lot about the suffering and sorrows of those people, and often find yourself begging God to do something, you are going to wake up sometimes in the middle of the night realizing that you forgot to pray.

What then?

Well, the first thing is, of course, to pray. You immediately turn your attention to God and start rattling off all the things you forgot. But after you’ve done that, you might find yourself quieted enough to see the one or two things that are uppermost in your mind and heart. You turn them over and over. You really pray about them. You put them into the hands of Jesus and admit your own helplessness in the face of that single trouble, that one burden that seems so crushing at such an unforgiving hour. And then, hopefully, you fall back to sleep.

And what were those one or two anxious cares? Were they the whole world? Were they all the things you promised to pray about? Were they political or economic or relational or familial? Who knows. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you went to God and prayed about the smallest, most intimate anxiety. If you forgot everything else, that’s ok, you’ll get back to it later.

More importantly, though, God won’t have to wait till later. He has everything sorted out now. And, though I don’t want to be dogmatic about this, but I’m sure I’m right because the business of prayer is not transactional or magical or in any way I’ll-give-God-this-and-then-he’ll-have-to-give-me-that, if you prayed about something small, something that the world would have believed inconsequential, but it was troubling to you, you will have done what God wanted you most to do.

In both cases, praying for the thing that most worries you, however small, and forgetting to pray for the whole world the moment you said you would do it, you, as a beleaguered Christian, are exercising trust. You are saying to God that you know he is big enough on both counts, that it’s not up to you to have a perfect prayer life and save the whole world, but rather to go constantly to him in the disordered fretful truth of your own troubled spirit.

Moreover, prayer, like everything else, is a habit that can be built, a manner of life that grows and expands the more you do it. So the smallest prayer for the least of your worries is the singular necessary step to grow in a deeper, richer, grander, more all-encompassing life of prayer. It is a great mystery. The more you pray, the more you need to pray. The more you pray, the more you see the need for prayer. The more you pray, the more you see the smallest need as worthy of prayer. And you will find yourself praying not only for yourself, but for the person that no one else sees.

The more you pray, the more you will discover God himself handing you other people to carry along in prayer. These other people will come alive in your mind and heart. You will find anxiety for them overtaking anxiety for yourself. And, having learned to take your own troubles to God, you will easily take these other people, who already belong to him, constantly into his presence.