As a small child, I remember my dad coming into our room at bedtime and letting us ask him any question we wanted. I can’t remember a single question he couldn’t answer. They were probably silly and easy but we didn’t care, we were asking the smartest person in our world. That’s the thing about small children, when they want something or want to know something they just ask—sometimes over and over and over again. They interrupt us whenever something pops in to their mind and usually have no regard for the impossibility of their request.
Maybe that’s why Jesus tells us that He wants us to become like little children. In Mark 10:14-15 Jesus says, “Let the little children come to Me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.” The “such as these” that Jesus is referring to are those who come to Him without pretense. They trust the One they are asking and speak their heart.
As I tried desperately to pray during a season of need, I found my prayers much more hesitant than hopeful. The situations were so hard I forgot about child-like faith and instead tried to “get it right,” so I didn’t ask too much or too little. I wanted to earn the answers I hoped for. I was praying about life and death health issues, heartbreaking marriage situations, and children who weren’t just turning from God, they were running as fast as they could away from Him and behaving accordingly. My prayers felt important, weighty, lonely, and ineffective.
Praying for someone sounds so generous, but what God showed me was that my prayers had actually become quite selfish. My motives were wrong (Jas. 4:3). I was so worried about doing prayer well, that I forgot about the God I was praying to. He is the One who welcomes messy, selfish, persistent, and sometimes irritating, little children. He wants to do the same with us. Our prayers will always be self-absorbed and filled with the wrong kind of wants, but if we try to fix them and ourselves to make sure we’ve got it right first, we’ll never come at all.
In his book, The Praying Life—Connecting with God in a Distracting World, author Paul Miller says, “We don’t know how bad we are until we try to be good. Nothing exposes our selfishness and spiritual powerlessness like prayer.” If we are going to be like the little children Jesus loved, we have to approach Him just as we are.
In an attempt to do this, I followed the advice of author Elisa Morgan from her book, The Prayer Coin, and bought a spiral notebook. I wrote HONEST on the top of the left-hand page and ABANDONED on the top of the right-hand page. Each day I spoke my heart as honestly as I could in my prayers. There were questions, doubts, and cries which made it messy and demanding. It felt bad, but it also felt really good and freeing. On the opposite page, I wrote about God: His names, His promises, and His words straight from Scripture. I could then abandon my requests to Him knowing that, by doing so, I could relax.
I remembered that the way to turn from my honest and very messy requests to what God desires for me are the prayers of Jesus who lives to intercede for us (Heb. 7:25) and the Holy Spirit’s intercession. Romans 8:26 says, “In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. And He who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God’s will.”
Just as we are made right before God because of Jesus’s death on the cross, our prayers are made right through Jesus. He will be attentive and then He will act in accordance with His good, pleasing, and perfect will (Rom. 12:2b), and that makes it well with my ask.
I don’t know what age we were when my dad stopped answering our questions, but I think we asked where babies come from and he very wisely went and got my mom!
