Three Things To Remember When Unbelief Threatens

Raw emotion took me by surprise even though the words had been penned six months earlier—by me.

Lord, I am struggling with our relationship regarding praying for him. It hurts my heart to struggle like this. Why do I pray for him? It isn’t so much your silence, it’s the opposite. Harm. Why do I feel like a curse instead of a blessing to him in my prayers? Help me with my unbelief.

As I revisited the situation that preceded the writing of those words, they blurred on the page as I tried to stem tears. My throat tightened, and my breathing quickened.

My son had embarked on a two-week trip, a seeking sojourn of sorts, to various national parks in the West. It had been a difficult year, and this trip was his way of closing that painful season and ushering in a new one. He anticipated the solace of silence as a time to reflect.

My prayers began at the first mention of this trip. Praying for it to be a great, restorative time. Praying for him to hear God speak in the silence. Praying for him to experience the kindness of strangers. Praying that, above all, in the beauty of God’s creation he would respond to God’s beckoning and rediscover his faith.

Then one week into it, all his camping gear was stolen from his campsite. He cut his trip short and returned home.

This is not what I’d prayed for. Not at all. And if this had been the only time adversity struck during situations I’d been praying over, I would have been fine. But it wasn’t. It was the proverbial straw that threatened to break this momma’s confidence in praying for her son.

Have you ever lost confidence in prayer? Doubted that your prayers make a difference? Prayed fervently for God to act into a situation only for that situation to grow worse?

Join me over at The Glorious Table as we discover three things to remember when praying gets hard and unbelief threatens in the encounter between Jesus and a dad in the Gospel of Mark.