When You (or Someone You Love) is on the Ongoing Prayer List

The email that lands in my inbox is full of cancer and career changes, relationship issues and eyesight problems. Sometimes our congregation’s prayer list feels a bit like a breaking news alert. But not all always.

Every once in a while another list comes out. It’s longer, and not new, not even new-ish. My prayer need, and the need of so many others, have been on this list for months…or years. Unlike recent hospitalizations and diagnoses and deaths, the Ongoing Extended Prayer List doesn’t come out every day. Because we’ve all seen these issues before.

(Yawn…) And what’s worse, my last name puts me at the very end in the alphabetical ordering. Most even committed pray-ers probably give up before they get that far. But for all of us who’ve earned a spot on this list, the ongoing part deserves a prayer in itself.

Since these prayer requests aren’t urgent or most times newsworthy, readers gloss over them. The shock factor has long worn off. Underneath, though—for both those listed and for those praying—there is that nagging issue of unanswered prayer and what it does to our belief system. Those longtime requests can seem to eradicate (or at least aggravate) our sense of faith, the tangibility of God’s promises, and the power of prayer.

Those longtime requests can seem to eradicate (or at least aggravate) our sense of faith, the tangibility of God’s promises, and the power of prayer.

Lori Ann Wood

A DIFFERENT KIND OF BLESSING

Most prayers are seeking God’s blessing. (True, we already feel a bit blessed that whatever landed us on that list in the first place hasn’t killed us.) 

But in its true form, “blessing” is a hard word. It is hard to ask for, and even harder to understand God’s response. I’m learning that when we pray for a blessing, we may not know it, but we are actually asking for His presence and peace rather than a particular outcome. Throughout Scripture, this has been His promise. But as humans, we tend to focus on the tangible. We want an answer we can see; we want the broken to be mended.

In the arena of ongoing prayer, God wants to reveal something we have to eventually learn in this broken life: So many problems can’t be fixed—only carried.

In the arena of ongoing prayer, God wants to reveal something we have to eventually learn in this broken life: So many problems can’t be fixed—only carried.

lori ann wood

One day before afternoon Kindergarten, I went with Dad to check cattle in a faraway pasture. His truck quit and in a pre-cell-phone world, we were faced with a miles-long walk home. That early January sky had started to produce a bit of ice, so Dad gathered me up in his arms, put his coat around us both, and zipped me in close. Together, we made it all the way home, with my dad humming familiar tunes the entire way. That day I learned a few things, that I am now relearning in the long-haul of heart failure. We don’t need to be gathered, held, and carried on a stroll next door. We need it when the way is long, and hard, and uncertain. That’s one of the only times I remember Dad scooping me up. I wasn’t his first child or his last. He was a busy farmer, father, instructor, husband, financial advisor, and community leader by the time I arrived on the scene. That long, hard walk gave me a rare opportunity to be close with my dad.

When our footing feels shaky and the path before us unsure, we can know this is true: we are gathered, cared for, and held in the Father’s unshaking hands.

Macie Moseley

CARRYING EACHOTHER

Though I’ve recently become a reluctant expert at being an object of prayer, I’m also starting to realize I’ve been carried most of my life. Turns out, they are closely related, and even synonymous. And, like our physical parents, communities of believers often become seasoned, professional carriers.

From my journal:

I was humbled today to get a text from one of the original prayer chain members who signed up nine years ago to pray for me daily at 10:00pm. This woman sent me a screen shot showing a message that still pops up on her phone. She never turned off the reminder. And the words she typed under the photo brought tears to my eyes, “Still praying.” One week or even one month wouldn’t have seemed to make such an impression. But nine years has helped me see the long-term element so crucial in real, practical faith. And to want that special sauce for myself.

Carrying others is a specialty of the church.

Why the church exists: We’re here to help carry people across the toughest thresholds and into a new future. To remind them that everybody needs oxygen to live—one kind of oxygen for breathing and the other kind for hoping.

Peter W. Marty

The church has been called the home that you carry with you. But it’s also (and maybe more importantly) the home that carries you, and carries with you. And isn’t that what we all so desperately need in this long-term assignment of life?

We are all constantly learning, to be parents to ever-changing children, to care for always-aging parents, to be the person we are in a world we didn’t see coming, to navigate a path we never thought we’d travel, or never thought we’d travel for this long. And we need the ones who have gone before to help faithfully carry us in that ongoing effort. 

CARRIED INTO THE UNKNOWN

Redemption is that great gathering up of every discarded, dismissed, and discouraged part of you into the loving arms of the God who is not afraid of your pain.

KJ Ramsey

When my kids were toddlers and when we took them on long hikes or found ourselves in unexpected scurries through the airport, they needed to be carried. But they always insisted they could do it themselves. And often tried to, before crumbling into a tearful, exhausted heap.

Sometimes being carried is frustrating. We want to walk on our own. We want to have our prayers answered before the journey gets too long. The hard truth is, God’s in the business of saving us, even when the rescue plan stretches to the other side of heaven.

We want

• Blessings without boundaries
• Love without lessons
• Wisdom without wounds
• Christianity without being carried

But it doesn’t work that way.

God’s people had wandered for 38 years in the “great and terrible wilderness” when Moses reminded them “your God carried you as a father carries his child, carried you the whole way until you arrived here” (Deuteronomy 1:31, MSG). Even then, their journey wasn’t over. In fact, they were about to take on the giants they’d feared so they could finally enter the Promised Land. That’s when Moses told them to look back. To see God’s provision. To recognize that He’d carried them every step of the way. 

We tend to believe that if the struggle drags on, God has left us. But that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Like with my dad on that icy January morning, the long road was what brought us into His arms.

Sometimes—usually late at night—it still hurts that this heart failure won’t one day disappear like the flu I thought it was. Lessons in the long haul are costly but deep. With the help of phone calls and email, my aging earthly dad again held me close in my early diagnosis years.

Looking back, I can see clearly how―in the hardest seasons of my life―Father God gathered, held, and carried me, too. Even when I wrestled with Him, He didn’t drop me. And no matter how daunting my circumstances or how deep my cries, I never grew too heavy for Him.

THE LONG WAY HOME

A song by Meredith Andrews, “Not for a Moment,” came out in 2011, a few years before I realized how much I’d need these words:

I was held in Your arms,

Carried for a thousand miles to show:

Not for a moment, did you forsake me.

Meredith Andrews

Now as we prepare to make that thousand-mile trip from our home in Arkansas to Cleveland Clinic in a few days for what must be the 30th or 40th time, it has renewed meaning. And though it has challenged my faith, the length of the journey has proven His care through it all.

Maybe you’re on the ongoing prayer list, too. If you’ve come to believe it’s too late, reread my text message from the church member who’s still praying, and remember how she’s playing a tangible role in how God is carrying me now.

Maybe you’re not on the ongoing prayer list. But you do have ongoing hurts. If you’ll let Him, God wants to rub His deep presence into your wounds and heal even the unspoken pain you’ve carried on your own far too long. 

With the help of His church’s arms, the Father would love nothing more than to scoop you up, button his warm coat around you, and carry you.

All the way Home.

Listen to this post read by the author HERE.