“God, do it again.”

How maybe our pleas don’t fall flat + a reflection on Tyler Staton’s treatise on prayer

Prayer and I have had a questionable relationship.

There have been seasons when I’ve been on my knees, pleading with a God who has to exist because if he doesn’t (like he says he does) well, then, I’m toast.

Struggling with a horrific addiction to cocaine and other substances as a teen. Suffering from undiagnosed, complicated PTSD for years. Loneliness. Despair. Depression. Betrayal. Almost dying from eclampsia after the twins were born (I was re-hospitalized after giving birth after the medical folks missed the diagnosis of pre-eclampsia). Then, having (what I presume) was Long Covid in 2020 after traveling to and from DC right before the world shut down.

These (and other situations that are more than I can count) have all led me to a desperate pleading, or even wrestling, with God.

Photo by Luis Santoyo on Unsplash

It’s tough to admit this to you. I’d love to be able to say (pretend) that my prayer life is flourishing and I’m always talking to God like a best friend.

‘Praying while doing the dishes’ sort of thing. Continually.

As I type these words now, I wonder at a God who does answer prayer–though at times, perhaps not in the way we want or expect. I also wonder at a God who has infinite patience with me as I continue (in my awful humanness) to live and love and serve and pray imperfectly.

It makes me wonder at doubt, too.

Doubt is like a shadow that I’ve been covered in over the years and at different points along my faith and recovery journey. Do you connect with this? Are you here now?

Have you wondered at the helpfulness of prayer, if it even works, and if it doesn’t then why do we still do it so much? Especially when we are squeezed and pressed and shaken by the really hard things in life? Have you wondered at the very existence of God in a world that is hurting, yearning, aching?

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Tyler Staton shares in his latest book, Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools: An Invitation to the Wonder and Mystery of Prayer, a story of what happened to him as a pimply and awkward middle school student.

He was struggling with believing in a faith he wasn’t sure about. He wondered if it all was a bit too good to be true. Then a mentor challenged him:

“What do you think God would do in the lives of your unbelieving friends if you spent every day this summer walking a circle around your school in prayer for them?”

Tyler decided to find out.

“My older brother had just turned sixteen, meaning any reason to drive anywhere was a good one. Every single day that summer, he drove me to the one place I planned to avoid: school. I wore a dirt path into the thick summer grass walking the school grounds with a folded-up student directory in my right hand.”

He woke early several days a week to even his church-going mother’s chagrin and walked and walked and prayed and prayed.

What is even more interesting than a young boy putting God to the test is what happened next.

Tyler’s inner prayer life led to him starting a weekly outreach meeting at this school at 6:30am in the morning on Wednesdays. What began in a small classroom soon needed more space and moved into the theater with, Tyler shares, nearly ⅓ of his entire 8th grade class coming to follow Jesus in that year alone.

“A couple months into these meetings, so many students were coming that we had to move from a math classroom into the school’s theater. By the end of that school year, approximately one-third of my eighth-grade class had come into relationship with Jesus in the darkness of the early morning, with all the atmosphere of hospital lighting, through the potentially heretical sermons of a thirteen-year-old skeptic.

It’s either completely ludicrous or utterly breathtaking to think that in the midst of all the insecurity of a thirteen-year-old boy— the nervousness of going out for the basketball team, the awkward (and slightly late) arrival of puberty, the sweaty palms of school dances— there was also the Spirit of the living God bending history in loving response to the prayed mumblings of a kid.

And not because he finds that kid particularly brilliant or his suggestions on how to run the world innovative, but simply because he finds this kid in all of his insecurity, awkwardness, and adolescent nervousness to be irresistibly lovable.”

He would later reflect:

“It’s impossible to know God through private prayer without equally participating with God in public mercy.”

Tyler shares this story in his book, and it is one of those stories that has shaken me awake again to the power of prayer. Not the idea of prayer, but the truth of it in all of its mystery and might.

It is also stirring in me a new longing in my own prayer life for God to show up and surprise me. To “do it again.” To not just rescue me from the really tough stuff, but to meet me in the every day and ordinary. In small acts of mercy. When I’m on stage and scared. As I prepare to have a meal with my family or find new ways to be of service (off screen) in my local community. When I’m walking.

Years after the quiet, middle school revival, Tyler shares how he revisited the school with that worn path he walked for hours holding the tattered directory of his classmates. Praying over each and every name. The school “became a temple to me, a cathedral, a meeting place, the hinge point of my whole life.”

Prayer brought revival to his school and lit a fire in his heart and if you know of his ministry now and service to his community (most of the good stuff is likely hidden), you would marvel at a God that does answer prayer.

Sometimes in big, bold, beautiful ways.

Sometimes with a whisper.

Sometimes in a room full of people hungry for more.

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Where are you at in your prayer life?

Do you long for a deeper connection with God?

Does this letter bother you (or perhaps you are thinking of unsubscribing)? I’d love to hear from you via email or in the comments.