Praying to Pray

This summer was a joy. But it wasn't only a joy. 2025 has been, personally, a really hard summer in the midst of a challenging year. Never before have I truly ministered from a place of weakness as I did over the course of the summer internship I led, that I felt deeply unqualified to lead, that was more emotionally, mentally, physically costly than I could have ever imagined. I probably shed more tears than any of the interns this summer, sometimes simply because I spilled a full glass of red wine directly into my lap (it’s amazing what pushes you over the edge). As the internship ended, in fact, my exhaustion was made physically manifest in a burst blood vessel in my right eye, just as my team welcomed 40 American supporters to Dublin for a week of prayer (I'm curious what their first impression of me was...).

I entered that week weary, asking myself, what does prayer look like for someone in a constant state of tension between exhausted and exhilarated, worn down and built up, carrying a sense of accomplishment and an acknowledgement of failure. How do I, how do we pray when it feels like there is simply too much to pray? How do you pray when you suspect you may not see the answers, certianly not quickly, of those prayers?

I returned to the first few verses of Psalm 5 in The Message:

Listen, God! Please, pay attention!

    Can you make sense of these ramblings,

    my groans and cries?

    King-God, I need your help.

Every morning

    you’ll hear me at it again.

Every morning

    I lay out the pieces of my life

    on your altar

    and watch for fire to descend.

The psalms show us so many ways to pray and this psalm is no different. David begins by crying out to God to listen, to pay attention, to see him in his distress, to hear his confusion of both longing and lament. And as I sat in this Psalm, preparing a devotion on prayer for the Prayer Summit, I saw three ways David shows us to pray when we too feel these tensions:

Pray prayers that we don’t understand: David begins by asking God "Can you make sense of these ramblings, my groans and cries?" He himself doesn't know what to ask for and I completely understand. Often I don’t really, truly know what it is I need when I come to God, let alone what anyone else needs. But we can trust that God does and that the “Spirit helps us in our weakness” groaning himself, because our wordlessness is of no hindrance to God’s understanding. 

Pray prayers repeatedly: Each morning, David came to God with the same prayer for help, never worrying that he was bothering God with this repetition because I think David understood that some prayers are more for our own formation than for anything else. I had a brief stint as a high school English teacher while I was home in Kansas and I tried a few time to make them memorize things, not just so they'd remember some quotes for a future test, but because repetition is formative, it builds new neural pathways and becomes a touchstone, a point for our future selves to return to, to measure growth or simply to revisit something of our past lives.

There are some prayers we pray over and over because we long to see something change. My dad has had stage 4 liver cancer for 11 years. It’s been my entire adult life to the point where I sometimes forget that it isn’t normal. Stories of miraculous healing after prayer always used to fill me with a sense of questioning and guilt (do I not have enough faith?) or anger and abandonment (or does God, if he's even there, just not care?). I have seen how the persistence in prayer, 11 years of praying for healing, for good doctors, for better treatment, for a father whose death isn’t always hovering in the background of every visit and big life event, has produced very few results, but has attuned my eyes to search for God in even the smallest of moments, the tiniest shifts, the miraculous ordinary. Eleven years of the same prayer has slowly loosened my grasp on my life, the plans for that life, and the lives of the people I love, and surrendered them to a God who I might not understand, but who I have said and begun to believe loves and plans better than I do. 

Pray prayers that consume: In verse 3, David tells God "every morning I lay out the pieces of my life on your altar and watch for fire to descend." He knows that the God he follows will not leave any corner of his life untounched. So he surrenders it anew every day.

We are called to be a living sacrifice, to come and die, to give up our lives to find them. Sometimes when we do that we have to watch our own desires die, because what we long to see God do is not always what his will is. In one of his Holy Sonnets, the poet John Donne captured something of this type of prayer with these lines:

Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you 

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend; 

That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend 

Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

We die with Christ to be raised with him. We are unmade to be remade. We are consumed to be purified. Elisabeth Elliot concluded her account of her first mission field as a single woman when, after a year of translating the Bible into a previously unwritten language in Ecuador, all the pages of work went up, literally, in flames with these words "Of one thing I am perfectly sure: God’s story never ends with ashes."

I often, in my work and life, feel disappointed, confused, alone, useless, small and insignificant. Of my prayers going not only unanswered, but unheard.

But I am certain that He hears us, he is shaping us. All that he is consuming will be replaced with something better, something made new. 

Ireland can be a difficult place. Ministry work can feel futile. We all, in our lives and walks with Jesus feel worn out and unsure of how to even talk to him. But David ends this psalm not with answers or results, but with hope for the future and joy in the present.

But let all who take refuge in you rejoice;

    let them ever sing for joy,

and spread your protection over them,

    that those who love your name may exult in you.

For you bless the righteous, O Lord;

    you cover him with favor as with a shield. (ESV)

Or as Eugene Peterson says, He “decks us out in delight.” Lord, would that be true even today.