Dear friend,
I want to tell you something about prayer that nobody told me when I started.
Not because it is secret. Because it is uncomfortable. And the Church has a long history of telling people the comfortable version of things and leaving the honest version for them to discover on their own, usually in the middle of the night when they are on their knees wondering why nobody warned them.
I am going to warn you tonight. Or confirm what you already suspected. Either way I want to say it plainly.
Here is the first thing nobody tells you.
Prayer does not always feel like anything.
I do not mean occasionally. I mean consistently. Regularly. For stretches of weeks and months and sometimes longer. You get on your knees and you talk to God and the room feels exactly as empty as it would if God were not there. No warmth. No presence. No sense of being heard. Just your own voice going out into silence and coming back to you unchanged.
I have been praying every single morning for fifty years. And I would estimate that roughly half of those mornings felt like exactly that. Nothing. Silence. The particular flatness of a conversation where only one person is speaking.
The Church tends not to say this out loud because it sounds like an advertisement for atheism. It is not. It is an advertisement for honesty. And I believe God prefers honesty to performance.
The feeling is not the prayer. The prayer is the showing up. The feeling is a gift when it comes and an absence when it does not. But the prayer happens either way. The monks who wrote about this called it spiritual dryness and described it as one of the most common experiences in the life of faith. Not a sign that something is wrong. A sign that you are being asked to believe without the assistance of feeling. Which is, it turns out, what faith actually is.
Here is the second thing nobody tells you.
Prayer changes you before it changes anything else.
I spent years praying for outcomes. For specific things to happen or not happen. For people to recover or return or reconcile. For situations to resolve in the way I believed they should resolve. And I kept careful mental track of how many of those prayers produced the outcome I asked for.
The honest answer is — not most of them. Not even close to most of them.
What I noticed instead was something I had not been looking for. The things I prayed about consistently — the people, the situations, the fears — I held differently after praying about them than I had before. Not because the circumstances changed. Because I changed. The grip loosened. The anxiety quieted. The thing that had felt unbearable started to feel bearable. Not because God fixed it. Because God had been doing something in me while I was busy asking Him to do something out there.
I do not fully understand this. I have been thinking about it for fifty years and I still do not fully understand it. But I have come to believe that the primary work of prayer is interior before it is exterior. That God is far more interested in what prayer does to the person praying than in what it does to the circumstances being prayed about.
That is not a comfortable theology. It is the one I have arrived at after five decades of honest observation.
Here is the third thing nobody tells you.
The prayers that feel weakest are sometimes the most important ones.
I have had mornings when I could not find words at all. When I got on my knees and the silence was so complete that I did not even know what I was asking for. When all I could manage was something like — I do not know what to say. I am here. That is all I have today.
Those mornings used to trouble me. They no longer do.
Because of a verse I keep returning to in Romans chapter 8, verse 26.
The Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans.
Wordless groans.
The God who designed prayer built wordless groans into the architecture of it. He anticipated the mornings when you would have nothing. When the words would not come and the feeling would not come and the best you could manage was showing up and being present in the silence. He did not design those mornings as failures. He designed them as a form of prayer He specifically provided for.
The showing up is the prayer. Even when it feels like nothing. Even when it produces nothing you can measure. Even when the only thing you can honestly say is I am here and I do not know what else to say.
That is enough. It has always been enough.
Here is the fourth thing nobody tells you.
Praying for the same thing for a long time without seeing results is not evidence that prayer does not work.
It is evidence that God operates on a timeline you cannot see from where you are standing.
In Luke chapter 18 Jesus told a parable specifically about this. A widow who kept coming to an unjust judge with the same request. Over and over. Without result. Without encouragement. Without any sign that her persistence was making any difference at all.
And then the judge gave her what she asked for. Not because he cared about her. Because she would not stop coming.
Jesus told that parable to make a specific point. He said will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off?
Day and night. The same request. For as long as it takes.
I have been praying for this country for fifty years. Day and night. The same basic request. Underneath all the specific requests for specific people and specific situations — the same underlying prayer. That God would not abandon America. That the faithful people who have kept showing up would not be forgotten. That the things worth preserving would be preserved by a hand stronger than any of ours.
I have not always seen the results I asked for. I have seen enough to keep asking.
I want to tell you why I am thinking about all of this on a Sunday.
Because so many of you have written to me about your own prayer life. About the dryness. About the silence. About the specific discouragement of praying for your country and your family and the things you love and not being able to see whether any of it is reaching anyone at all.
I want you to know that what you are experiencing is not a malfunction. It is the normal experience of everyone who has ever prayed seriously for anything that matters.
The feeling is not the prayer. The showing up is the prayer. And the showing up — even on the silent mornings, even on the dry mornings, even on the mornings when all you can manage is I am here and I do not know what else to say — is accumulating into something you cannot yet see from where you are standing.
It is reaching someone. It always has been.
One more thing before I close.
I have been praying specifically about what is happening in this country for a long time. And one of the things that has sustained that prayer — that has given me a framework for why I am still asking after all these years — is understanding what God appears to be doing in the middle of what looks like chaos.
That is part of what I tried to put into They Tried To Stop Him: What The Bible Says About Donald Trump. Not just the pattern of opposition and survival. But the larger question underneath it — what does it look like when God is working in a nation? What are the signs? What should the people who are praying day and night be watching for?
I wrote it as an act of prayer as much as anything else. As the written version of the same request I have been making on my knees for fifty years. If you have not read it yet I want you to read it this week. You can find it by clicking on the image below:
Alternatively, you may find it here: https://fatherthomasletters.com/products/they-tried-to-stop-him-what-the-bible-says-about-donald-trump
Pray this week, friend. Even if it feels like nothing. Even if the words do not come. Even if the only thing you can manage is showing up and being present in the silence.
That is the prayer. It has always been the prayer.
And it is reaching someone.
God bless you. I am glad you are still here.
With you in prayer always,
Father Thomas
Today I want you to do one thing.
Just one.
Get on your knees today. Not for long. Five minutes is enough. And if the words do not come — do not force them. Just stay. Just be present in the silence and let that be the prayer.
Then come back tomorrow and do it again.
That is all. That is everything.