Answer: People who are religious pray for the same reason that we breathe. It is a natural and necessary spiritual reaction to our life. Not everyone has such a need and I respect the many ways people without faith try to find hope in a broken world, but for the religious ones among us prayer is a necessary act of spiritual centering. The problem you are having is perhaps connected to a belief about what prayer can and cannot do.

 

Prayer is not magic. The reason that the Bible rails against the worship of idols is that idolatry is a form of magical thinking. It is the belief that we can impose our will on God’s will with sacrificial offerings. However, God’s will is not our will and so all the forms of prayer that ask God to change something for our benefit are bound to lead to a crisis of faith, such as the one I hear in your question. Even Jesus asks in his final agony, “Father, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). The lack of a response to a petitionary prayer is not a betrayal. It is an invitation to accept your life in full with all its blessings and challenges and make of it a witness to faith and good works.

 

The key to moving past the notion of prayer as magic is to come to a place where we ask for nothing. Rather, what we do in our prayer life is to thank God for the blessings that have already been showered upon us without adding a to-do list for God to make our life even smoother.

 

God can always make our life better, but God cannot make our life smoother. That requires our active partnership with God.

 

There is an old Jewish legend that God did not split the Red Sea for our ancestors in the Exodus from Egypt until a person named Nachshon ben Aminadab from the tribe of Judah walked into the water up to his nose. Only then, to keep Nachshon from drowning, did God split the sea. When prayer is a passive waiting for God to fix our life, it rarely succeeds, but when prayer is an accompaniment to our own efforts to move forward, then God can split any sea for us. That is why and that is how I pray.

– Rabbi Marc Gellman

I suffer from depression, and I am currently dealing with a long-term affair my husband had. A sin I often battle is negative thinking and choosing to not allow the enemy to control my thoughts and attitude. I am severely struggling with this, as I am attempting to process my husband’s affair. I find myself being angry, bitter, hurt, lost, and feeling unloved. Pray that God frees me from the enemy and reminds me to constantly turn to him to have my emotional needs met.