Prayer can get hard when life gets hard.

I wonder why that is. Maybe we start to wonder whether or not it makes any difference. Or perhaps we just get so tired—emotionally, physically or spiritually—that we just stop doing it. When life is overwhelming, it takes all your energy just to put one foot in front of the other.

If you’re in one of those periods right now, I encourage you to keep going. But also know this. There’s nothing wrong with being brutally honest and brief.

You don’t need to be long-winded or fancy. In Matthew 6:7 Jesus warns against it: “And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words.” You can always count on Jesus to give you the straight goods!

Some people tend to think that their prayers need to be like the prayers they hear their pastor saying on Sunday morning. Keep in mind that he or she is leading prayers for a lot of different people dealing with a lot of different things, and is doing so based on how the Holy Spirit is leading them.

But when you pray to God you are alone with him. Use your own words. Speak from your own situation, your own hurts, and your own longings.

George Buttrick said that in desperate times it feels as if we are “beating on Heaven’s door with bruised knuckles in the dark.”* Yes, it sometimes does. But we are still at the door, we are still beating, and we are still confident that the Lord will answer the honest cries of his specific children.

Don’t make prayer hard when life is hard.

Be yourself.

There’s nothing wrong with being brutally honest and brief.

---

Notes:

–*Quoted in: Richard J. Foster, Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home (New York: HarperSanFancisco, 1992), 17.

–Bible quotes are from the NIV.