How Prayer Teaches Us

For much of my life, I treated prayer as an act of last resort.  

When things were going fine, I seldom prayed because I didn't think I really needed to.  I reserved my prayers for the moments when I felt I had no other recourse.  If things were beyond my own power to control, I would turn to God and pray as fervently as a saint.  

My understanding of prayer as more than just a cry for help has grown over the years.  But I will say that my cries for help from God have taught me a great deal about my own sense of faith in God's presence in my life.  

When everything else falls away, prayer remains. It is often only in the moments when our plans collapse—when the phone doesn’t ring, the diagnosis doesn’t change, the relationship doesn’t heal, the anxiety doesn’t ease—that we discover what we truly believe about God. 

Prayer, then, is not merely a spiritual habit; it is a lifeline. It is how we cling to grace when nothing else seems certain.

Mahatma Gandhi once wrote: 

“When every hope is gone, 'when helpers fail and comforts flee,' I find that help arrives somehow, from I know not where. Supplication, worship, prayer are no superstition; they are acts more real than the acts of eating, drinking, sitting or walking. It is no exaggeration to say that they alone are real, all else is unreal.”

There is something profoundly biblical in that confession. Gandhi names what so many saints have discovered: prayer does not depend on circumstances being favorable. 

Prayer is most honest when “every hope is gone.” Scripture echoes this. The Psalms are filled with cries from the edge of despair—“Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord” (Psalm 130:1). And yet those cries are not empty. They are grounded in the character of God.

The New Testament carries the same truth. Paul writes, “The Spirit helps us in our weakness… with sighs too deep for words” (Romans 8:26). Even when we cannot form the prayer, God meets us in it. And Jesus himself invites us into this kind of persistent, daily dependence: “Ask… seek… knock” (Matthew 7:7). Not as superstition. Not as a last resort. But as communion with the living God.

Prayer is “real” because God is real. Prayer is not a technique for controlling outcomes; it is a practice of surrender. In prayer, we stop grasping for the illusion that we are self-sufficient. We become honest about our needs. We come home to God.

So pray daily. Pray simply. Pray honestly. Let prayer become the place where peace finds you—again and again.

Prayer

God of mercy, teach me to pray when I feel strong and when I feel weak. Meet me in my ordinary days and in my desperate moments. Quiet my anxious heart, deepen my trust, and fill me with your peace. Amen.

Reflection Questions

1. When have you experienced help arriving “from I know not where” through prayer?

2. What keeps you from praying consistently, even when you know it brings peace?

3. What would it look like to make prayer your most “real” daily practice this week?