Prayer and Perseverance
Scott Lyons
10/14/2009

On my son’s first day of kindergarten, he cried the entire day. When he got home I told him I had prayed for him, to which he said nothing. But later that evening, crying again because he did not want to return to school, he said that God had not answered my prayers for him. I had prayed for strength and God had not given it. He felt abandoned and alone.

God is love. All our thinking about God, our theology, must begin and end with that truth. All his being and doing with respect to us are born out of that truth. Sometimes we must suffer, we must hurt. This is the world in which we live. This is what it means to be human. And God uses our pain to shape us into full human beings, partakers in the life of God. He redeems it all. God is love. Much of this enterprise of suffering is part of life’s mystery, part of the mystery of God. It is difficult to understand, but we must suffer because the cross precedes the resurrection.

Sometimes in the discipline of prayer our prayer seems ineffectual. But God hears. Understand that Christ did not suffer that you and I might not have to. Jesus says, “I have told you all this so that you may have peace in me. Here on earth you will have many trials and sorrows. But take heart, because I have overcome the world” (John 16:33, NLT). Our peace does not come from a lack of trials or sorrows, but in the midst of them because we are in Christ. The pain we feel is self’s death—if we had already died we would not suffer. If we were only Christ’s, then nothing could disturb the peace of perfect trust. Of course, there are many kinds of suffering. And sometimes when we pray for healing, or resolution, we are met with silence. But we are steadfast; we persevere in prayer. Not because we are under the impression that our stubbornness or persistence will somehow twist God’s arm into acquiescence. No, we persevere in prayer because it is all we have—it is our breath, our life. God is our strength; his grace is perfected in our weakness. We pray, therefore, because we must. But God is no genie in a bottle. He wants us to grow up in him, to share in his life, and that often involves being plunged into darkness and silence and pain.

God wants you and me to be strong in love, to be long-suffering and kind. How do we become stronger in comfort? Or more precisely, how do we become stronger without discomfort? Consider the human body. Exercise is not comfortable, but we sweat and work through the pain, knowing that in the end our efforts will bear good fruit. In other words, we discipline our bodies in order to perfect them. Or consider the heroes of stories. At the end of the story, the hero is stronger than he was in the beginning, not in spite of the trials he has suffered through, but because of them. He is far more capable, far stronger after and because of his ordeals than he would have been had he remained in comfort. The hero is meant for greatness, for something beyond the ordinary, but he cannot arrive there by sitting on his front porch. With his quest before him, he sets out and overcomes. In some ways, our lives are similar to the hero’s. We are meant for something else, for Someone else. We have been called to share in God’s very life. And to reach the heart of that Life, one must pass through the Cross.

My son is growing up. He is getting stronger every day. He is meant for great things: not as a CEO or a lawyer, not as a politician or a teacher, but as he is, a son of God. It is its own kind of suffering to see my child in pain and to be unable to help or bear it for him. But I can pray and persevere in my prayer. The same God who loves me loves him as well. The questions I need to answer, and perhaps you do as well, are, “Do I believe that God is love?” and “Do I trust his love for my child?”