What to Pray When You Don’t Know What to Pray For

There aren’t many topics as guilt inducing to the Christian as prayer. Combine that with the subject of evangelism (like, “Have you been praying for opportunities to share your faith with your co-worker??”) and you will see a head explode. Christians all over the world have their own unique struggles when it comes to the Christian life. For American Christians, we just seem to be chronically prayer-less.

One reason many of us don’t pray more is that we frankly don’t know what to pray for. Knowing what to pray is obvious in times of great need (“Help!”) and even in the really great times (“You rock, Buddy Jesus!”). But most of life is lived in the middle: we get up, eat breakfast, go to work for eight hours, come home, eat dinner, spend time with the family, put the kids to sleep, have a Breaking Bad marathon, and go to bed. And its here that we get so stumped with prayer. We sit down to pray and come up short. What do I need prayer for?  Or someone asks us how they can be praying for us- “I don’t know. Think I’m good. Thanks.” Not to be insincere mind you. We just honestly can’t think of anything that we need prayer for.

When I started dating my now-wife, I knew I wanted to be very intentional in how I pursued her, but I wasn’t quite sure how to go about doing that. What were the things I needed to know about her in order to know whether or not I wanted to marry her? One of the best pieces of advice I got in response to that question was another question: “What stops you from proposing tomorrow?” This was early on in our relationship, so I could’ve given a lot of reasons for not popping the question immediately: “I don’t know about this, this, or that!” Alright then those are the things to be intentional about finding out.  Continue at Tenth Leper