The Struggle to Pray
Hi, I’m Joni Eareckson Tada and I have a confession to share with you today. You see there are times in my life when I really want to pray. I really want to be near to God, but because of pain or heaviness of spirit, I can’t seem to summon the energy to put a prayer together. But when I feel I cannot put two words together, I am always reminded of a little poem. And it goes, “Prayer is the burden of a sigh, the falling of a tear; the upward glancing of an eye, when none but God is near.” Isn’t that beautiful?
My friend Margaret Clarkson, now with the Lord Jesus, penned those beautiful words. And that bit of verse summarizes so much of what I learned about prayer from this godly woman. Margaret was a missionary in Canada who wrote many wonderful poems – and virtually each one was born out of her life of severe and chronic physical pain. The last time I was with Margaret was at Ontario Bible College. We spent lunchtime talking together, me in my wheelchair, and she was there lying on her side on a cot. She was in so much pain she simply could not stand up for any length of time. As a result, Margaret taught me many lessons about praying through pain; lessons that I remember to this day as I struggle with my own chronic pain when I can’t seem to put nouns or verbs together in a prayer!
Maybe you can understand. Maybe you’ve got sleepless nights when prayer seems impossible, when you cannot summon up enough energy to put two sentences together in worship or praise or intercession.
Margaret Clarkson experienced many a painful time like this, and I will never forget when she told me, she said – now listen to this – she said, “Joni, the first thing we must realize is that it is neglect of prayer or refusal to pray that is sin, not the inability to pray. If the earnest desire to pray is present, we must not condemn ourselves because we find prayer hard or at times even impossible.” Friend, did you get that? Did you hear what she said? It’s so important. It is not the inability to pray that is sin; it is the neglect or the refusal to pray that is sin. I tell you what, that certainly took a load off my heart when she said that to me.
And looking back, I believe my missionary friend was harkening to Psalm 38 where the psalmist cries, “Lord, all my desire is before you; and my sighing is not hidden from You.” And elsewhere it says, “The desire of our soul is for your name and for the remembrance of you.” Did you get that? Sometimes our prayers take the shape of a sigh or a simple desire or a thought or just a hope directed toward heaven.
I know that was true of my friend, Margaret. Her struggle to pray was never out of neglect or refusal. It was simply at times her inability to order her prayers before the Lord in a clear and concise way. But that didn’t really matter, because she never really stopped communicating with God. She offered him her groanings. After all, if the Spirit could pray with groanings and words that cannot be uttered, can’t we?
And it was this powerful fact that sustained Margaret through her most mind-bending times of pain. And because of all her groanings which were before the Lord, all her thoughts and sighings, God fulfilled the desire of this woman. She truly feared the Lord. If you are in pain, you may think what you whisper to God seems awfully feeble or faint. And maybe it is. But that fact does not change the reality of Psalm 145: “The Lord is near to all who call upon him, to all who call upon him in truth.” Do that today!
