Chapter 2 Lack of Direction

Lack of direction is another fatal thing in the prayer of the character in the Hemingway novel. The character had no idea what he was praying for or what he should have been praying for, so his prayer turns out to be a great big prayer about everything, which is a great big prayer about nothing much in particular.

I would hazard a guess that this is the primary reason most people hardly ever attend the mid-week prayer meeting of whatever Christian assembly they attend. The collective prayers of a Christian assembly typically turn into interminable prayers for just about everything and anything under the sun. Who can bear a along, undirected, seemingly endless thing like that? And especially if those praying are giving off "vibes" that they are not really sure their prayers are being heard. This is where so-called "Christian duty" becomes dead works indeed.

Lets return to our analogy again.

Suppose you are walking down the street, and again I come upon you and ask you buy me a sandwich and bring it back to me where I am on the street. Now suppose I also asked you for a cup of coffee also, and - oh, yes - a Twinky. Well, that might not be too bad. If we know each other by this time, it’s obvious I need a meal off you.

But now suppose I didn’t stop there, but went on to asking, item by item, for the entire contents of the grocery store, in a long, interminable request.

Well, I suspect you would suspect me of playing some kind of a game with you, because I will seem to be naming all those items for some other reason than needing them. You would probably look around to see if there is a third party nearby that I was really trying to say something to. You would certainly know that I was not really serious about receiving anything from you.

Another aspect of undirected prayer is that it is often misdirected prayer. The people who are making the requests have already unconsciously convinced themselves that prayer is an airy-fairy thing anyway, so they often ask for things that are unwarranted by nature, and egotistically selfish.

In Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain observed a prayer meeting being held on board an oceangoing going passenger ship that was leaving its harbor. These diligent people of prayer came into the meeting room with the knowledge that the prevailing wind happened to be against their vessel and was thereby slowing it down. So what did they do? Like most unthinking people of prayer, they started praying for the prevailing wind to reverse so their vessel could get underway faster. Mark Twain had great fun with this because there were a number of other ships that were coming into the harbor and a reversal of the winds could have slowed all those other ships down.

This is the kind of unthinking, undirected, misdirected prayer that is born of one thing only: an unconscious and habitual unbelief in prayer. If Christians really did get their prayers answered on a regular basis, you would bet that they would be a lot more careful and directed in what they prayed for.

And that’s the next item on the list.