When God Says, “No”

Reshaping Prayer and Learning to Listen

Thomas R. Hauff

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9781610970631
  9781498258944
• eBook ISBN:
  9781630875879
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

Does it feel like God has stopped listening to your prayers? Do you approach prayer with confidence or with confusion? Perhaps you have given up organized prayer entirely, resorting to monotonous, habitual, shallow repetitions--day after day after day. This work will address these and other questions we all have about communicating with God. In these pages you will find straight talk about substantial pitfalls along the road to authentic prayer. Dr. Tom Hauff provides an in-depth investigation into the ways we pray, the goals prayer should accomplish, and how we respond to God's answers. You will find that God has not stopped listening and that prayer does not have to be confusing. It can be vibrant and life-giving, productive and encouraging, but there is a key to such a prayer life. In this book, in an easily accessible way, Dr. Hauff unfolds this foundational key: We genuinely communicate in prayer only when we learn to listen honestly to God.

1

People Don’t Enjoy Prayer

I hadn’t been sleeping again. The cycles were constant in my life back then. I call it my routine. A few days of sound eight-hour nights—then a few weeks of sketchy, three- to four-hour nighttime wars. After that, my body finally exhausted and worn down, another few nights of hard, deep sleep. But never enough. Never Enough. And there were always the dreams. Usually violent dreams. Pent up anger that was never allowed to be vented during childhood found a way out at night. It always had, and it stayed with me for years. And then there was the talking. Waking my wife to tell her something nonsensical but vitally important, “Don’t you see that?!” “Stop pushing me!” Occasionally I lashed out physically. Unconscious in mind, but body fully awake to terror. Sometimes I connected with her. Thank God never seriously. What kind of person beats their spouse in their sleep? But this is just background. I’m not really the topic of this story. I’m just the foil to another’s performance.

I’d been doing my routine for years and was especially active that summer. It was hot in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and sticky-wet from rain as well during that one particular week. It was late at night and we were in bed: Kathy sound asleep; me in the throes of another sleeping war. The window was open in our second story apartment. It was the upper right in a fourplex of one-bedroom apartments. Our relatively new roommate, Shep the Wonder Cat, had been out all day and to her dismay, she was out tonight as well in the thunderous rain pouring from the sky. As I said, I’m not the topic of this story, Shep is our star performer.

Shep the Wonder Cat was not casually named. For a cat, Shep was smart. She knew her name and would come at the call, which I admit is not that impressive, but there was more. She would play fetch with a nerf ball, and she even learned to shake hands—paws—70 percent of the time. She apparently knew a good mark when she saw one as well. She’d been abandoned in the field next door and was a hobo until she wandered onto our porch one day and laid down. Now, we weren’t really allowed to own a cat in our little fourplex, but we didn’t technically own Shep either (though we did provide her with a cat house, food, and medical care for her many mishaps with other untoward felines in the neighborhood). I think maybe Shep thought she owned us. That would fit her worldview better.

As I said, Shep was smart. Sometimes she was too smart, like that night in the driving wind and rain. I had been up and talking the last few nights and was tossing again that night, but luckily woke before I started talking and kicking. I think Shep woke me. The wind was driving almost sideways into the window, and just under its howl I could hear a plaintive crying. I rolled out of bed and stepped to the window knowing instantly that poor Shep was in trouble. We had no screens so I could just lean out and survey the tiny patch of back yard, and as I scanned around—rain splashing against my face—there was nothing to hide under.

I finally looked straight down the back of the house thinking Shep might be cowering at the base of the back wall. She wasn’t. Our eyes locked in the fuzzy glare of the freeway’s high-intensity discharge lamps. Every now and then a bolt of lightning ripped through the sky some distance away and I could see her soaked, determined face clearly upturned to me as she hung on the back wall of the apartment building. Smart Shep could see our open window, she had the claws for the task, and she was assaulting the wall like a climber attacking K-2 in the sleet season, but she couldn’t comprehend the obstruction that lay above her! Just above her was our downstairs neighbor’s window directly below ours—our neighbor’s open window! Shep was headed for a rude surprise if she had entered that window, for they definitely were not cat people.

Kathy called to me, breaking my dismayed fascination, “Are you ok?” I jerked around and whisper-yelled, “Shep’s climbing the back wall!” I couldn’t see Kathy in the dark, but I know she was thinking, “Great, he’s at it again.” A few nights ago it was “Ants in the headboard! Ants in the headboard! Don’t you see them?!” Tonight it’s “Shep is climbing the back wall!” She wasn’t even going to get up. She was thinking that I needed to just work through whatever brain-wreck I was experiencing this night. But it wasn’t a brain-wreck! I was awake! I turned back to Shep, who had stopped for a moment, silent, after seeing my face above her. Thinking of nothing else I hissed down at her, “Shep! No!”

She was just a cat. I know that. But I swear I saw something strangely human in her eyes at that moment. She looked directly into my eyes, held for a moment, and then just—let go. She didn’t spin at first the way a cat should. She didn’t even seem to be breathing. She just retracted her claws and fell backward, spread-eagle, belly up, eyes still locked on mine. It felt surreal. I’m sure a bolt of lightning lit both of us up for the split-second when she began to fall. The look on her face seemed to cry out to me with a question: “Why are you saying ‘No!?’” And then the lightning was gone and dark grey, shadowy Shep was lost to my sight in the rain soaked night.

“No” is such an unexpected answer isn’t it? Even for a cat.

•

We all know that generalizations are not very accurate at any detailed level. It doesn’t matter what you generalize about, there are always facets of any subject that defy categorization in generalized terms. However, I have come to a belief about people and prayer I think might warrant a general statement: For the most part, people don’t really enjoy prayer. People like the idea of prayer. People engage in activities they classify as prayer. But they do not really care for authentic prayer.1 We are more than happy to dash off a few short “Help me!” prayers a day (or some such things), but when it comes to carrying on a deep and involved conversation with God on a personal level (as we do with friends for example), we are less than thrilled to partake.

That’s one of those things we don’t like to admit out loud, but I still suggest it is true. Look at the weekly prayer meeting in your church—if you have one. If people really loved praying, why are our prayer meetings always so small compared to our potlucks, Bible studies, and Sunday services? Why do people devour the latest popular book on prayer but spend a mere fraction of the time spent reading it on actual prayer?2 Let me be even more honest and bring it home to a personal statement: I have not really enjoyed prayer. From what I’ve been told, from what I’ve often read about the how’s and why’s of actual prayer, and from evaluating much of my own prayer and that of others, it often seems like a bewildering waste of time (to be brutally honest).

I don’t think I’m alone in that sentiment either. Having ministered among God’s people since my conversion in high school (in Bible studies, music teams, Sunday schools, seminary and Bible college classes), I’ve become convinced that people find real prayer to be, at best, a difficult task to undertake and, at worst, an unwanted but required chore attached to their Christian faith. Additionally, when many of us do perform it, it leaves us with little joy, small comfort, and no excitement about the next time we have to do it. Prayer is often approached in the way we might approach cleaning the bathroom. We roll up our sleeves knowing a job needs doing, we take no pleasure in the work, and we wait until it’s needed to go at it again. And once more, I must add, we never talk like this about it.

The fact is, like many, I’ve had my long bouts of just giving up on the whole thing. Maybe you’re different. Maybe you haven’t given up yet. But do you trudge to prayer time as though a hundred pound rock is sitting squarely on your shoulders—feeling the obligation to pray but having no desire or joy at the prospect? Be honest here. Don’t answer that question with a shrug, or with the Christian platitudes you’ve heard all your life about how Jesus prayed all the time so we ought to also—and therefore you’re totally psyched to get in there and pray. I’m asking directly, in the silence of your own head, telling the truth: Do you really love to pray and can’t wait to do it again each day? I can answer a resounding yes when the question concerns studying my Bible or teaching on the Bible or meeting with believers. I have never been able to say yes when the topic is prayer. Can you?

I’m convinced many people feel this way about prayer inside where only they can see. And I’m equally convinced that it ought not to be this way. And if the Bible shows us anything, it shows us people who don’t seem to have that problem. We simply do not find stories in the Bible that tell us how tedious and unfulfilling it is for the characters to go to prayer and how they struggle with having to do so.

This is not to say characters in the Bible are not pictured struggling while in prayer at times. Jacob is said to have “wrestled with God” for example in Genesis 32:24. Many take this to mean he struggled in prayer with God. Jesus himself is said to have sweated blood as he prayed over his upcoming crucifixion.3 But such difficulty in prayer is different from difficulty in coming to prayer. The former is the difficulty of deep conversation with God, of wrestling with ideas and sorting out problems, of sharing intimacies, and learning to be honest with ourselves and our God. The latter, difficulty in coming to prayer, belies an inner dislike for the process.

Furthermore, on a practical level, when I look at what prayer is supposed to be— conversing with my God, who deeply loves me, and whom I deeply love—this disliking of prayer just makes no sense.4 There’s got to be something wrong with having to force ourselves to converse with our loving father. After all, when I look at my relationships with ordinary people I don’t see this problem. Take, for example, my wife and friends. I love them. Certainly I love God just as much as I love them (most of us would say we love God even more). Consequently, I very rarely say to myself, “I really don’t want to talk with my friends.”

I’ve been married for over twenty seven years. There are those times where I have said that about my wife. It’s normal to say such a thing occasionally, but it ought to be somewhat rare. If I were saying that I don’t want to see or talk to my wife for days, months, even years, then most of us would say there is a problem there.5 And even if it is not rare in your marriage, I doubt we would think it’s normal not to want to talk to our spouse, not to look forward to talking to him or her. The plain truth is we usually do look forward to talking to our spouses and friends. We even make time to do it if we’re rushed during the day. We miss them when we don’t do it. And we feel deprived and uncomfortable when we haven’t talked to them for more than a day. That being said, when it comes to God, we often don’t want to go to prayer with our loving father. And often when we do go to him, we describe prayer as a “difficult” part of our Christian walks. Oh sure, we don’t mind a few requests tossed off now and again. We are OK with telling God how angry we are on occasion. But authentic, serious prayer time is not on the agenda for most of us.

It’s not as though we’re not excited about our general relationships with God, either. Some might suggest that a poor prayer life is just the tip of a poor Christian life all around. But I haven’t really seen this as necessarily true. It seems to me that many devoted Christians love to study the word, love to hear his voice teaching them how to live and grow. We enjoy fellowship with other believers. We look forward to our weekly Bible study group, and again, if talking with believers around me is any indication, there is general enjoyment of most aspects of the Christian life. We truly do want to grow closer to our God, but for some reason, prayer is a sticking point for many of us. Think about that: talking to God is hard for us. It sounds odd even to say such a thing out loud. But still, if the truth be told, we just don’t want more real prayer; if anything, we want less of it. How did prayer get to be this way for us?

Now maybe I’ve been too strong for some of you. Maybe you’re in that category of people that don’t dislike prayer. Perhaps you’re one of those ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: People Don’t Enjoy Prayer
• Chapter 2: Reasons People Don’t Enjoy Prayer
• Chapter 3: What Are Our Real Expectations?
• Chapter 4: Mitigating Our Problems—and Creating More of Them
• Chapter 5: Models of Prayer in the Bible
• Chapter 6: Suggestions for Prayer Summary
• Bibliography