“Don’t you believe in miracles? Why should we pray at all if we can’t get miracles?” An earnest Latter-day Saint pressed me for answers about her friend’s looming family disaster.
“We don’t pray just to get what we want. We pray to deepen our connection with God with trust that He will lovingly lead us through the challenges of life.”
She objected. “That doesn’t make any sense! Doesn’t He want us to have the righteous things we are praying for?”
“God always wants the best for us which includes learning to trust Him. He wants us! He wants our whole souls! As we draw close to Him with trust, He will guide, heal, and strengthen us as we face all the unfairness and tragedies of life.
“So, He’ll let a family be destroyed when He could prevent that? Aren’t we told to pray over our flocks and our fields? Surely, He cares more about our families than our tomato harvest!”
“He cares about one thing above all else—that we love Him and trust Him with all our hearts and souls. When we pray primarily for Him to fix our problems, when our focus is only on what we want to happen, we are missing the point. When we throw ourselves on His merits, mercy, and grace, we are putting first things first.”
She struggled. “Sure. We pray for His will to be done. But doesn’t He want to help families?”
“You’re right. He does. He weeps in heaven as we misunderstand, blame, and injure each other. Brokenness and fallenness are characteristics of mortality. Yet, He has an amazing ability to heal everything He touches. Our job is to get to Him so He can heal us. To ask Him to heal us before we fully surrender to Him is to get things backwards.”
“So, we don’t pray for the healing of our families?”
“We pray first and foremost for mercy. The prayer that transformed my life was the same one that transformed Alma’s life. When I became dejected by my own failure to become what I should be—what I yearned to be, I found a quiet place, laid on the floor, and cried out using Alma’s words: ‘O Jesus, thou Son of God, have mercy on me.’ It may have been the most powerful prayer experience of my life. When I tossed my agenda and threw myself completely on His mercy, everything changed. I was immediately engulfed by God’s love. It wasn’t until I was willing to submit my will, my life, my heart to Him that I was ready to pray for anything else.”
She protested. “But my friend loves God. She just wants what’s right for her family.”
“You cannot put your faith in any specific court and judge, but you can trust God absolutely. It may be that your friend receives the hopes of her heart. Or it may be that God asks for her patient faith as He prepares magnificent blessings over time. Is she willing to trust Him completely with her life either way?”
Long pause. “That’s hard. That’s very hard.”
“Yes. It is. And it is the one thing that changes everything. You observed that we are to pray over our flocks and fields. You’re right! And notice that when Amulek tells us to pray over everything, he sets a specific context:
Therefore may God grant unto you, my brethren, that ye may begin to exercise your faith unto repentance, that ye begin to call upon his holy name, that he would have mercy upon you;
(Alma 34:17-19)
Yea, cry unto him for mercy; for he is mighty to save.
Yea, humble yourselves, and continue in prayer unto him.
“When Amulek tells us to pray over our fields, flocks, household, enemies, the devil, and our crops, he is not suggesting that we employ God as our farm manager. He is inviting us to bring the power of God into every corner of our lives. When we seek God’s blessings without building a relationship with Him, we have no power.”
After a pause, my friend inquired, “She only wants what is right for her family. What if God does not grant her that? What if her family is torn apart. She won’t survive!”
“To have her family torn apart is a terrible experience! I cannot fathom what she is going through. I also know by experience that we can bear all things when we trust God completely. Maybe you remember what Brigham Young said to a group of departing missionaries who were anxious about their families. ‘You must feel—if they live, all right; if they die, all right; if I die, all right; if I live, all right; for we are the Lord’s, and we shall soon meet again’ (DBY, 324). That is faith—when we trust God with our lives and the lives of all those we love.”
<Sigh>
I continued. “Maybe you remember Fenelon’s prayer.”
Behold my needs which I know not myself; see and do according to Thy tender mercy. Smite, or heal; depress me, or raise me up: I adore all thy purposes without knowing them; I am silent; I offer myself in sacrifice; I yield myself to Thee; I would have no other desire than to accomplish Thy will.
“The prayer of submission became very real as Nancy and I went though 20-plus miscarriages. Learning to trust Father completely prepared us for the day when the doctor told me I had cancer. I knew in that moment that, if I lived, I was in God’s hands. If I died, I was in God’s hands. All that mattered to me was that I was in God’s hands.”
She seemed to understand the point. “So, even if the family is divided, she trusts her children to God.”
“Yes. The scriptural pattern is to cheerfully do all things that lie in our power and then stand still with the utmost assurance that God will do right, that He will take care of us and those we love” (See Doctrine and Covenants 123:17).
Prior to his death from cancer, Tony Snow wrote of the lessons he learned about trusting God through his ordeal.
The natural reaction [when faced with trials] is to turn to God and ask him to serve as a cosmic Santa. “Dear God, make it all go away. Make everything simpler.” But another voice whispers: “You have been called.” Your quandary has drawn you closer to God, closer to those you love, closer to the issues that matter—and have dragged into insignificance the banal concerns that occupy our “normal time.”
(Cancer’s Unexpected Blessings, Christianity Today, July 20, 2007)
…You discover that Christianity is not something doughy, passive, pious, and soft… The life of belief teems with thrills, boldness, danger, shocks, reversals, triumphs, and epiphanies… Through [our] trials, God bids us choose: Do we believe or do we not?
…We don’t know much, but we do know this: No matter where we are, no matter what we do, no matter how bleak or frightening our prospects, each and every one of us, each and every day, lies in the same safe and impregnable place—in the hollow of God’s hand.
That is where peace is to be found—in trusting God completely. That is the ultimate miracle—to trust God and love Him with every thought, every concern, every project, and every soul in our care. When we love Him that completely, we discover the peace that passeth understanding.
My newest book, The Compassionate Heart: Uplifting Your Life and Relationships was just released as an eBook. It will be available very soon as an audio book. To get the eBook, go to:
Thanks to Barbara Keil for her inspired refinements of this article!
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