ArticleBlog | Prayer when God feels silent – prayer without words
Prayer when God feels silent – prayer without words
Author: Andy PeckPost Date: 13.06.24
In the silence of our inner turmoil, prayer often surpasses verbal expression, becoming a profound intimacy of the soul with God. Navigating the tangle of mental illness, we discover that prayer persists as a steadfast anchor even when God’s response is silence.
Before we begin, I should probably level with you: I am no expert in prayer. Despite having an active prayer life at the beginning of my faith aged five, it was a risk for my family to ask me to say grace because I tended to pray for so long that the food would be cold by the time I’d finished. By the time I was ten, the ease I had with God had dissipated. Perhaps it was swallowed up by the first inkling of questions that arose around my faith: where was God when it hurts? Why did he allow cancers and tsunamis to ravage us and our world?
This was further compounded when, at the age of fourteen, mental illness began to snake its way around my life and faith. I had no words for these new feelings, aside from the tears that fell relentlessly for months on end as I wore out my youth leader’s supply of tissues.
From then on, my faith and mental illness grew together in an uncomfortable way. My questions grew, but my belief remained – even on the darkest of days.
It changed my prayer life permanently. I felt as though my prayers had been blocked, the previous ease I’d had was gone. This was perhaps because I had so little understanding of what was happening to my mind (it was the early 2000s and awareness of mental health and illness was only just coming into the public consciousness). I all but stopped praying with spoken words; but began a diary which became my prayers. I found I could write things that I could not vocalise and, as the years passed, I learned that my tears, too, could be prayers.
Answered and unanswered prayer
