AN UNUSAL PRAYER

At its best life is tough, even for Christians–especially for Christians! The people you love best will hurt you the most. They are often dishonest, unfair, inconsiderate, and a whole lot of other things. A few are as mean as a junk-yard dog. Sometimes you feel like giving-up, and you see no reason to continue on in a relationship with them. You get to the point that all your thoughts are colored by your ill feeling toward them. You reach the place where you don’t even want to see them–you just want to move on and sometimes we do. We often get to the place where we don’t even know how to pray. We are hanging on by the skin of our teeth, and we wonder —, o how we wonder!. What I have just described is Monday morning for a lot of pastors. It could be any day of the week for you. It is a terrible time in your life and you hope against hope that you can hang on another day and not do something really stupid!

In a time such as this we are desperate for a life-raft, anything to hang on to that will keep our head above the water. Sometimes we find what we need in an unusual place. Out of the blue something comes across our path that helps us stay on the right track. It happened to me. I don’t practice writing out prayers and I don’t pay much attention to those who do, but I couldn’t help but be encouraged by the spirit of this prayer from the heart and hand of Charles Swindoll—I hope it helps you too:

It’s not often, Father, that we make such a statement, but today we thank You for the injustices in life that have crippled us and broken us and crushed us. Unfair circumstances have bruised us deeply and beaten us into submission to You. Inequities have brought us to such a dead end that we can’t see the way back out. The only direction we can look is up. We often think that our unjust circumstance is what has ruined our lives . . . when instead, it could be the means You have ordained to give us life. Father, if those people we know who have trudged through the valley of the shadow of death were not alive today, walking with You and telling us to keep going, where would we be? How much we need their examples and encouragement! Thank You for each one.

In light of Your sovereign grace, we thank You for blindness, for paralysis, for loss, for death, for broken dreams, for dissolved partnerships, and for disillusionment. In faith, we praise You for times of insecurity, failure, divorce, and even those when others have treated us unjustly. We see the storm, but You enable us to also see beyond the storm, so we trust You to make all things just in Your time. We believe that You sovereignly intend for good what others intentionally mean for evil.

We pray for those facing the frustration of injustice in these and dozens of other categories. We ask that they may be able to find in Jesus Christ the strength to go on . . . especially those who have almost decided to give up. We pray that they will offer everything to You in full surrender. Everything.

In the name of Jesus Christ, the Conqueror. Amen.