At men’s group this morning, a
couple guys shared very personal “success stories” about answered prayer,
citing a relative whose potential recurrence of cancer had turned out to be
benign and an experience of recovery from a broken neck after a car accident. Not to be outdone, another guy regaled us
with a story of seemingly miraculous experiences in the life of a persecuted
Chinese pastor including an escape from jail that seemed to be orchestrated by
God himself.
When I hear such accounts, with the
phrases like “God answered our prayers” repeated numerous times throughout, I
often feel confused and bewildered with my own life experience and its
inevitable and unanswerable question:
why didn’t God answer my prayers and save my son’s life? In fact, I sometimes have such strong
reactions that I have to monitor myself carefully to keep from either lashing
out in my anger and anguish, or getting up and storming out of the conversation
as I struggle to contain the strong emotions I am feeling.
I left the group this morning with
my head spinning in this cycle between the success stories and my sense of
un-success or failure as we watched Daniel die before us.
This evening I read a passage in
Yancey’s book where he talks about the church’s propensity to promote and focus
on success stories in spite of the fact that he argues the Bible and human
history are full of many more stories of “failure” in prayer – people not
getting the answers to prayer or the results that they wanted.
I suppose it is human nature to
want to focus more on success than failure, but somehow I sense that many of us
need to acknowledge our experiences that feel like failures if we are going to
maintain any perspective or even a continuing sense of faith in God’s goodness. It is too bad that so few Christians seem
willing to “go there”.
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