The Vow

THIS BOOK BEGAN AS a promise I made to God in the worst year of my life.

In July 2008 I lost my job in the middle of the Great Recession. I was sure another would come quickly. None did, and the phone began ringing every five minutes: creditors, collection agencies, the mortgage company warning of foreclosure, credit card companies threatening to sue. I was scared to death. At night I lay awake running numbers that refused to add up; in the morning I prayed, and by breakfast the phone had started again.

I have to tell you what my praying was like then, because this whole book stands or falls on that honesty. I believed prayer was a mechanism. I had been taught that if I spoke the name of Jesus over a problem with enough faith, the problem would move, so I claimed, I declared, I rebuked. Every morning the mountain was exactly where I had left it. I had thought I possessed a strong faith, and never imagined God would let a believer land there. Since the mechanism could not be wrong, I concluded that I was: not enough faith, not enough effort, too much sin. Anyone who has lived inside that theology knows what it does to a soul. The god at the end of it keeps books with a bookkeeper's face, and you are always behind on your payments.

Then the house went. I had designed that house myself, from the ground up, every wall and every window. We signed the papers under duress and drove away. As far as I could see, that was God's answer to a year of desperate prayer: a moving truck.

I was wrong. God was answering the whole time. I could not see it because I was watching the wrong door.

Here is what actually happened that year. None of the catastrophes I rehearsed in the dark ever arrived. The lawsuits never came. We were never homeless and never hungry. Near the bottom, I found a can of chicken noodle soup marked down to ninety-nine cents at a grocery store, bought it, and that is how God fed me that day. I have eaten at fine tables since, and I remember none of those meals. I remember the can. Daily bread, it turns out, is exactly what the prayer says: bread for the day, given daily, never a year in advance. People who hear this story always ask about the next day. The next day a woman from the church brought me whatever she could find in her refrigerator, a can of soup, a potato, and more. Those were days I thanked God for what I was sure was my last meal, certain I would beg by morning. I never had to. "I have been young, and now am old," the psalm says, "Yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken, Nor his descendants begging bread" (Psalm 37:25 NKJV).

The loss itself was doing something too. One question finally cut through my self-pity: why did losing the house hurt so much, if God was feeding me every day? The answer took me years to admit. I had been clinging. The house, the salary, the picture of myself as a man who could handle his own life: those were what I trusted, and most of my prayers asked God to guard my grip on them. What I called faith was an illusion of control. He loved me too much to leave me holding it. He pried my fingers open one at a time, and at the time I called each finger an unanswered prayer.

Somewhere in that darkness I made God a promise. A question had pressed on me all year: why does God let those who trust Him suffer? I promised that if He carried me through, I would one day write down what I had learned in the dark about how He answers prayer. It could not be a victory story; I had no victories to report. The job was gone and the house was gone. It would be a testimony about what our darkest moments are for, written by a man who had been to the bottom of one, not alone there. This book is that vow, kept, many years late. God has been patient about collecting.

Now let me say plainly what this book is and what it is not. It is not a book of techniques. I have no method that makes God do things, and I distrust every method that promises it can. In many years as a clergyman I have sat with too many people those methods quietly destroyed. They come to me ashamed, convinced that a prayer failed because their faith was too thin, or that God grades on effort and they flunked. If that is you, I wrote this book for you, and here is my message in advance: the defect you keep looking for in yourself does not exist. It is not a book of arguments either. I will not try to prove that prayer "works." What I have is what a clergyman has: Scripture, stories, and scars. Let me be honest from the first page, as I am with my own congregation. I am a clergyman, and still not all of my prayers are answered the way I ask. I do not always know what God's will is. Anyone who claims he always knows, and always receives, is not describing the Christian life; he is describing a fantasy of it. Yet I have watched God answer prayer for more than three decades. Sometimes He answers exactly as asked. More often in ways nobody thought to ask. And always, I am now convinced, He answers with a purpose better than the request. That conviction is the whole argument of this book, and I mean to earn it one chapter at a time.

Under that conviction sits one verse that has carried me longer than any other:

This poor man cried out, and the LORD heard him, And saved him out of all his troubles. (Psalm 34:6 NKJV)

Notice the order. First the cry, and it is a poor man's cry, the cry of someone with nothing left to bargain with. That was my condition in 2008, and it is the secret condition of everyone who prays. Then the hearing. Then the saving, out of all his troubles, with not one word about how or when. The psalmist tells us God saved him. He never says it looked like a rescue. Having been the poor man, I can tell you it almost never does.

So here is what I ask of you. You have a prayer of your own. You knew which one before I finished this sentence: the healing that has not come, the marriage that has not mended, the child who has not come home, the door that has not opened. Bring it with you. Do not leave it outside to be polite. Here is the road we will walk, the road your prayer is already on. First the asking: what prayer is, and what it never was. Then the waiting: silence, delay, disappointment, and the thorn that stays. Then the answer: how God actually responds, seldom how we pictured it. And last, the Giver Himself, who turns out to be what we were asking for underneath everything else.

"The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; Blessed be the name of the LORD" (Job 1:21). Job could say both halves in one breath because he knew both came from the same hands. By the last page of this book, I want you to be able to say it too.

We begin with a confusion I carried for half my life without once examining it: a quiet assumption about what prayer is actually for.