Pinkies, Mountains, and Unanswered Prayers

I have a friend named Bob who does miraculous baby prayers.

A sophomore asked me a question about prayer from Mark 11 and it reminded me of Bob.

When asked if we wanted kids, for the first 5 years of marriage, Katie and I would answer “cuss no!” So, when Bob offered to pray for us in a field in Mexico, we said, “No, we’re good.”

And he simply said, “Whenever you’re ready.”

Around year 5 or 6 we slowly shifted from “Cuss no!” to “maybe…” to “yeah, we want to have a kid!” Nevertheless, after a few years of trying to procreate (ßthat’s a weird sentence to write and publish) we were still childless. We read books, visited doctors, and charted hormones. Nothin.

Then we remembered Bob, and we were going to see him in Mexico that April, so we thought, “Why not?”

We caught him in a dirt parking lot and asked for prayer.
He had Katie and I hold each other’s one hand, while holding out our pinkies on our free hand. He grabbed each of our pinkies and said “Lord, however, whenever, Amen.”

2 months later Katie was pregnant.

Drop the mic. Play the walkout music. Release the balloons. God gets the glory.

We are deeply grateful for what happened in that period of time… and our daughter is unreasonably awesome… so we feel immeasurably blessed.

But a strange side-effect is that it has really messed with our prayer life.

Here’s why: We have plenty of other friends who wanted kids for longer. They went to healing rooms, asked for more prayer, had more doctor’s appointments, and had progeny prophesied over them.

Still no kids.

So, is Bob magic? Does Bob’s prayer ever not work? If so, how does God choose?

Here’s the passage that the sophomore asked about that reminded me of Bob:

“Have faith in God,” Jesus answered. ²³ “Truly I tell you, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in their heart but believes that what they say will happen, it will be done for them. ²⁴ Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. ²⁵ And when you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive them, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins.” Mark 11:22-25 NIV

This text takes my own mind down a few rabbit holes, with no systematic theological points that can be tied off with a nice application bow. It invites me into a mental wrestling match with the text that leaves me exhausted but stronger. By the time students reach their sophomore year, I’ve found that most of them are ready to play around in the rabbit holes and emerge with a more robust perspective on faith and reality. So, here’s an invitation to join us:

Rabbit hole 1: You don’t have enough faith.

You’re clearly a jerk if you say, “you just don’t have enough faith,” to anyone who does not have their earnestly petitioned prayers answered with an affirmative. But this is a difficult conclusion to get around, especially with the “does not doubt in their heart” line that Jesus drops. But what are we doubting? In my own prayer life, my doubt is often less about God’s ability to do something miraculous, and more about God’s desire to do something miraculous. There have been so many of my own prayers that I am glad were denied, because God seemed to know better than me. So, isn’t a little bit of self-doubt warranted?

Rabbit hole 2: The old “yes, no, later” answer

If you’ve grown up in the church you know that a default response for disappointed prayers is “God always answers prayers… he just sometimes says ‘no,’ or ‘maybe later.’” This is often only a satisfactory response in the rearview mirror where we can be grateful for God’s denial. And while this response seems to be reasonable, given human experience, it seems mostly like a BS answer in regards to interpreting this text.

Rabbit hole 3: Commanding vs Praying

In this text, Jesus seems to not be talking about prayer, per se. He doesn’t say that we can ask God to tell mountains drown themselves… but rather, that we can tell these mountains to do things if we have enough faith. And we see this modeled in the ministry of Jesus and his disciples… they tend to not pray and ask God to do healings, signs, and wonders. They just declare them in the name of Jesus. Nevertheless, the end of the text then refers to asking for things in prayer, so we cannot completely separate these declarations from prayer.

So, back to rabbit hole 1… do we just lack faith to make cool things happen? Are the cessationists and dipsensationalists right in claiming that the 1^st century was a specific “apostolic age” that has come and gone? On the other hand, I have heard plenty of stories from my pentecostal friends where this stuff still happens today. But what about when it doesn’t work? What about “pinky-prayer” Bob? What about my childless friends who received prophetic words of children?

Rabbit hole 4: He’s not being literal…

Context, context, context. This discussion in Mark 11 emerges because of Jesus’ miraculous cursing and withering of a fig tree. Some scholars believe that the fig tree is a symbolic representative of the Temple/Religious/Industrial complex of Jesus’ day, and his action is a condemnation of the system. Perhaps his disciples were aware of this, and they would have taken Jesus’ words an empowerment to topple unjust systems, not to uproot literal mountains. But this interpretation seems to overlook the actual physical nature of Jesus’ fig-tree sign and the many things done in the book of Acts by his students.

The closest thing to a moral

Sometimes I think we pray for things passively and pad each statement with generous helpings of “if it be Your will” and “if you want, Lord.” And while it is good for us to acknowledge God’s sovereignty, I think that this acknowledgement can often turn our prayer life into a parody of prayer, simply pretending to ask for things while never letting our hearts desires be fully exposed to God. Since God knows our hearts anyway, it’s silly for us to play games in prayer where we pretend like we don’t actually want them. In the same way that a teen might speak to a parent with respect and say “Can I have $20 please? I’d really like to go to the movies,” we can approach our Abba and boldly ask for those mountains to take a swim.

(For more prayer rabbit holes, check out mine and Wayne’s podcast on prayer: https://confessionshsbt.com/2017/10/07/chsbt-024-why-pray/)