I sank to my knees in front of rows of flickering flames from candles lit by hundreds who had come to pray here before me. This sacred space on my college campus was a place I frequented every week as a student, praying with friends and lighting candles for special intentions.

Please let me pass this test. Please let this relationship work out. Please help me find my way.

Now that I was back on campus decades later, I took a moment to sit back and reflect on all the times I had come here to connect with God.

In a flash, I suddenly saw all the prayers I had whispered in this place. Prayers to keep that boyfriend (we broke up). Prayers for the right job (found it, though I wandered my way there). Prayers for a baby (years later, a yes). Prayers for healing (cancer-free for two years now).

In that instant, I was overwhelmed by the goodness God has poured into my life. Even when prayers took years to be answered, even when they did not turn out the way I planned, I still felt abundance and awe at God’s mysterious movement in my life.

Yet in the same moment, I pictured my brother — who went to the same school, came to the same place to pray, sank to his knees in front of the same candles, and begged God to rid his body of cancer. He got love, hope, friendship, care, support, and the best treatments that modern medicine could offer — but he still died from the same disease.

What are we to make of the mystery of prayer?

Anyone who promises you easy answers misses the truth that believers since the dawn of time have been wrestling and reckoning with the same agonizing questions. Does God hear our prayers? Why are some prayers answered and not others? How can we make sense when bad things happen to good people (and good things happen to bad people)?

Truth be told, I am quick to fixate on the prayers that didn’t go my way. The babies that didn’t make it. The friend whose treatment didn’t heal her. The relationship that couldn’t be saved. The sufferings I still endure. I miss the forest for the trees when I wallow in what I didn’t get, even when my life is full of what God has given, though it wasn’t always what I wanted.

But in the cold night air, praying in the place where some of my deepest prayers had been answered and others had not, I could not escape one clear truth:

We all walk around in the midst of answered prayers.

Of course we know that every prayer has not been answered in the ways we want. Thank God for some of that (younger-me praying for that boyfriend to be the one, I’m looking at you). But because of human nature, we often focus on the ones that did not come to fruition in the ways we hoped. Yet every single one of us has received an answered prayer, whether big or small.

A stunning fact worth stopping to celebrate.

Maybe you prayed for a friend, and now you’ve found one. Maybe you hoped for a good job, and the right position finally came your way. Maybe you wanted a home to call your own, a supportive community, relief from physical pain, or healing from emotional hurts you’ve carried — and now you have received a version of exactly this.

As humans with restless hearts and insatiable desires, we always hunger for more, always pleading with God for the next good thing. And as believers living in a broken world, our hearts ache for what we prayed for and did not receive.

But we cannot lose sight of the truth that we are living among answered prayers. (And often we ourselves are the answers to someone else’s prayers.)

The spiritual writer Thomas Merton said, “There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.” Among all the griefs, losses, and broken hearts that this hard life holds for each one of us, we cannot lose sight of this holy fact:

You are an answered prayer, and you have received an answered prayer.

What prayer has God answered in your life? Take a moment to sit in the power of this profound truth, in whatever way big or small, your pleas or praises have been heard. Paul’s words to the Colossians remind us to stay persistent in prayer but also to be grateful for the basic, bedrock truth that we have a God who hears us:

“And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him… Devote yourselves to prayer, keeping alert in it with thanksgiving.”
Colossians 3:17, 4:2 NRSVUE

Whenever we give thanks for an answered prayer, we can begin to see how God has always been working in our lives, even in small or unexpected ways. And when we step back to see each tiny prayer we offer, flickering like a candle in the darkness, we might just catch our breath at the mystery of how God works through prayer, beyond our wildest imagination.

Laura’s latest book is Mary’s Way of Advent: Prayers & Practices to Slow Down & Seek God. Check out this collection of Scripture, reflections, prayers, and creative ideas to celebrate the four weeks of Advent through hope, peace, joy, and love.

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