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James 5:16 Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.

Alright, not sure, but this may get depressing/uncomfortable quick. If you’re not on board with that, you might should stop reading now.

Okay James. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective, huh? Well, thanks for that, but, truth be told, I already knew that. See, here’s the thing. I don’t fit the bill. There’s whole chapters of the bible spent proving that fact, but the simple and easiest way is to go read the parts about Jesus. Now, here’s the thing, and this may seem just a bit obvious but bear with me.

Jesus was more righteous than me. Like… in the way that oceans have more water in them than deserts do, and that analogy still fails to get the real scope of what I’m talking about here.

Jesus didn’t get all of his prayers answered. If you want to know what I’m talking about, go take a look at that whole thing where he was praying in the Garden of Gethsemane.

I really, really, really have to fight with myself to believe that my prayers do something. I mean sure, apparently being righteous is enough to make your prayers have a real effect. Sure people like Elijah, Moses, Paul, and Peter, get their prayers answered. Those guys were spiritual giants to my tiny little spiritual ant. Again, I’m not righteous. In fact, not only am I not righteous, I’m often a self-righteous, self-absorbed, smart aleck, jerk.

Besides that, isn’t God going to do what God is going to do, anyway? My knowledge, compared to His, is a lot like my righteousness compared with Jesus’. What do I know? I can barely, and only sometimes, understand what’s going on in my own mind and heart. How am I supposed to know what is best for myself? Let alone those around me that I care about. How am I ever going to ask for the right thing?

But wait. God is going to do what God is going to do, right? That’s a genuine question. How is a finite being, who is in time, supposed to understand the actions of an infinite being, who is outside time? Does cause and effect even apply when time doesn’t have meaning?

I genuinely can’t understand the workings of prayer, beyond the level of communication. For whatever reason, God loves me enough to want me to talk to Him. Cool. I benefit from that and He’s glorified by it. Got that. Makes sense.

But I’m supposed to ask Him for things? Are you kidding me? The very Being in and from whom I have my own existence? The Lord of Space, Time and Dimension? A Being who’s very speech causes reality? A Being who could cause my destruction, not just by making the effort to annihilate me, but by simply ceasing to continue the effort of allowing my life to continue? The. Holy. King. of. Everything?

Ask Him?

But He has told me to. And He is holy, meaning he is superlatively good. He wants my good. He wants me to grow. He wants to bless me. He has commanded me to pray, not just in communication, but to come to him to ask Him for my daily needs.

So I must. Even if it makes no sense at all.