7 Prayers That Work

Lord, You can have all of me. My self-image, my dreams, my family, my career, my pain, my fear, my plans,  my secret places. I surrender. All of it. I give it to you. It belongs to you, anyway, because I belong to you. I don't know why I keep pulling this all back on me. It weighs me down, clouds my thinking, discourages and scares me. I am weary from the burden of it. You want to carry it for me. You want to carry me. So you can have me back again. Again and again and every time I forget and pull this all on myself. Again and again. I love you. I trust you. I need you. Amen. “Come to me,  all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.   Take my yoke upon you and learn from me,  for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.   For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”-- Matthew 11:28-30 For more prayers about this, click below: "When you want to quit praying" "What to...

A day like Memorial Day stirs emotions for military families. (Read my personal blog about Memorial Day  here .) Perhaps it even affects regular families who sit with an empty chair at every dinner table. Grief is stirred both by remembering and by trying to forget. (Read about remembering grief here .) What should you do when you're overwhelmed with loss or sadness? You should lament. Just complain, vent, rage, mourn, grieve, cry, blubber. To God. Ask rhetorical questions. Make accusations. Just do it with a dependance and faith on God's love for you. Do it with the awareness that you are not and cannot see the whole picture of your life. Understand that grief and loss always blur reality. With or without immediate answers, when you lament, you must choose to trust in the unseen. That is faith, after all. For more about the lament, read my recent full Guideposts blog on lamentation here . A brief excerpt is below: Here are a few things you can include in ...

What kind of prayer do you pray most often? Requests, probably. Me, too. Requests    are my website's most-clicked on kind of prayer. It seems we're all looking for the right way to ask God to help us. Guess what the second-most popular prayer is? Lamentation. The lament. I love that. I have an audience of grievers and groaners. Praise God. Learning to lament has been one of the most impactful aspects of my spiritual growth. Instead of crying in sorrow, lamenting teaches you to cry out to God (that's the literal meaning of lament). Lamentation is faith in action, maybe even more than when I make a request. When I lament, I dump my heavy burdens, my grief, and my hopelessness at God's feet and say something like, "I don't know what you're doing in my life right now, but help me trust you. I choose to believe you will work all things together for my good. But oh, God, this hurts so much. Cover me with your Spirit!" When I make a req...

Experts guess that between 10-25% of pregnancies end in miscarriages, for various reasons. To a woman who knows she's pregnant--who knows there's a baby forming in her womb--it doesn't matter why the pregnancy fails. She just knows that one day she was a mother, and the next day, she was not. She feels grief. For all those excited and anticipating the birth of a baby, a miscarriage is a death. If this is you, here is a prayer to help you grieve and hope: Dear Abba Father, You have created all things. Your work is perfect. You created me for a purpose, and you created this little life for a purpose, although it doesn't make sense to me now why a helpless baby's life should be cut short so quickly. I am so terribly sad-- I feel such a sense of emptiness and loss. To be honest, I feel robbed. This is confusing, because I know you aren't a robber. You have come to give life and give it more abundant. So why did you bless me, only to remove the bl...

Have you ever felt emotionally raw and desperate? Angry, even? My first response in these situations is either to rage at God or someone else. God is a better choice. The best response is to pray a prayer of anguish. To lament. It's one of the ways that God responds to human desperation. Grief, when directed at God, is a prayer. It's a lamentation that expects a response. Anguish can prompt the most beautiful and heart-felt prayers we ever pray. Maybe you're not sure what to say. That's okay, too. The Holy Spirit hears the groaning of our hearts and responds to us with grace and love (Romans 8:26-27). I go directly to Psalms when I need to groan. I start at Psalm 3, and I just keep going until I've said enough. I've underlined a lot of verses about anguish and fairness and deliverance in those pages, so I pray those verses back to God. Somehow, reading the Psalms give power to my prayer and assuage any guilt I'd have for expressing my pain and misery. ...