Prayer…. What’s the point? Prayers didn’t keep my child from dying, even though I based my prayers on scriptures in the Bible. So why bother praying anymore?
This is one of the greatest struggles I hear about, in conversations with other bereaved parents. Here is part of an email I received recently on this subject.
We are told to “Ask and ye shall receive.”
When prayers are “answered” or miracles happen, we praise and thank God. But, when people die despite prayerful petitions begging to save them, people quickly say that it just wasn’t God’s plan. It feels like God is always off the hook.
Are the answered prayers and miracles part of God’s plan, too? Were those miracles going to happen anyway? Or did people actually influence God and change his plan with their prayers and fasting? If I’m “meant to” be hit by a semi-truck while driving the kids to school, should I bother asking God to ‘please keep us safe today’ during our morning family prayer?
Have I been asking for the wrong things in my prayers my whole life? I believe we can ask for and receive comfort, knowledge, understanding. But, I no longer believe we can ask for specific blessings and miracles – like healing someone, or protecting someone. I don’t think we can influence God. I think God is just going to do whatever the heck He wants and we just have to accept it.
I’m struggling to see the point of prayer if our prayers have no influence on God?
I will admit, this is something I have personally struggled with, along with my husband, Dave, even years after the death of our oldest daughter. I have continued to pray, and have conversations with God, but I can still find myself hesitant when putting requests before Him for things like healing or protection for my family (which can really frustrate me).
So, when I received the above email, I decided it was time to settle this issue in my own heart once and for all, and yes, I prayed about it! It took me several days before I was ready to sit down and write a reply.
The rest of what you will be reading is my reply (along with some thoughts I have had since then) on the struggle we can have for many years with the issue of prayer, following the death of our child.
- A precious friend of mine shared with me this past week that she grieved for 3 years for not being able to have children. She started out praying for “God’s will” and then got to the point that she ached for a child so badly she didn’t care about God’s will, she just wanted a child and would pay the consequences later.
That caused her to become hard hearted, and when God broke her, and she was able to once again pray for His will, even if it meant never having a child, she became pregnant. But then she lost the baby. Talk about cruel, right? But because she had wrestled with that issue, in her deep pain and grief, she was able to trust God to get her through it. (I will say she has been blessed with three children since the pregnancy loss, but she has also gone through breast cancer, which became another level of trusting God.)
My friend told me it was because of each thing she went through, she was able to pray and trust God through the next trial.
- Another close friend, who lost her son-in-law in a grain bin
accident several years ago, has talked to me about her struggle with this issue. What is the point of praying at all, if God isn’t going to answer and just do what He wants, or not step in to save someone or protect them?
She has come to the conclusion that even though we don’t like this “Christianeze” answer (because people throw it around in a flippant way), that God does answer our prayers. But just because it isn’t the answer we wanted, it doesn’t mean He isn’t good or that He didn’t answer.
We need to keep praying because it is more about our communication and relationship with Him than it is about “having enough faith” to command things to happen in the name of Jesus. And if God backed us up by giving in to everything we prayed for, we would make a mess of things because we are so selfish and don’t see (or care about) the big picture! His will is not always our will, and we have to be okay with that in this life, until we join our children.
- In one of my books (When Tragedy Strikes: Rebuilding Your Life with Hope and Healing After the Death of Your Child) I share a couple of things that might be helpful. When our daughter, Becca, was only three years old, she was diagnosed with bone cancer in her leg. People were fasting and praying for her, and I truly believed the more people I told that God was going to heal her, the more it showed how much faith I had, so God was obligated (according to His Word) to heal my daughter! But it didn’t work that way. Becca still went through nine months of chemo and had her little left leg amputated. This sent me on my own journey about this faith stuff!
Years later, when our daughter Becca was married and became pregnant, she was put in the hospital at around five months along and given a 50/50 chance of surviving the labor and delivery because of heart damage caused by the chemo. I didn’t understand why I was crying so much when they wheeled her back to the OR take the baby early. My husband nailed it when he said, “It’s because we don’t know which direction we are going to have to trust Him for.”
We need to remind ourselves that Jesus said those who mourn will be comforted, not that we wouldn’t have death and difficult things affect our lives.
- The other thing mentioned in When Tragedy Strikes is when I tell about a time that I was praying one of those “fix it” prayers, quoting all the right scriptures, etc.
I heard God ask me in my heart which prayer I wanted Him to answer. I was confused, so He reminded me how often I have come to Him and given Him permission to do whatever He wants to do in my life to get me where He wants to be. He then said, “What if I want to use this circumstance in your life that you are praying 
against, to get you where I want you to be? Which prayer do you want me to answer?”
Wow! I took the “fix it” prayer off the table and reminded myself that I have made Him Lord of my life, which trumps anything I want, no matter how painful that might be here on this earth.
During my days of prayer and contemplating how I wanted to answer this parent’s email, God gave me a very strong earthly illustration of why it is still valid and important to come to Him with our requests. I have shared it with dozens of people already, and they all say it is really good, and helps to make sense of this quandary we find ourselves in.
I will share that in a part two of this blog, along with a few things God has spoken to me since then, as I continue to meditate on all of this, asking Him to continue solidifying this new foundation He is laying in my life about prayer.
(To continue on to Part 2 click here.)
Are you struggling to move forward in your life because of the painful things that have happened? Are you confused at God’s vision for your life? Do you need a deeper revelation of who God is in you?
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Expressions of Hope is written by author, speaker and singer Laura Diehl. She and her husband, Dave, are the founders of Grieving Parents Sharing Hope (GPS Hope). Dave and Laura travel full time in their Hope Mobile (a 38-foot motor home) to be more easily available for speaking and ministry requests, including being invited to hold one-day GPS Hope & Healing conferences.
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looking behind me, and thinking how surreal it was that Dave was driving our house! (And even after a year, I still feel that way most of the time.)
It is easy for me to convince myself that people are counting on me, so I must stay on top of making sure I have helpful content and stay consistent with what I put out there to give pareavors hope, not giving myself the same grace that I tell others to give to themselves.
we always have grape juice, but I can’t think of a single time I have taken communion in the Hope Mobile. I definitely need to get back to doing this!
Music moves us, and music changes us. It affects our brains and our souls, which in turn effects our thoughts, our beliefs, and our emotions, which in turn affects our actions.
Hope Mobile has been to meet up with parents across the country and share a meal together. We are honored to be a safe place to hear their story, share their tears and laughter, and talk about how our children are probably excited that we finally met each other!
North Carolina, Virginia, Florida, St. Louis, and here in Wisconsin. We were able to minister to literally hundreds of grieving parents, helping to guide them to a place of hope, light and purpose after the death of their child.
has also been a joy! We are so very blessed to take these children on the road with us so that anyone who sees our house on wheels also sees all the precious children who are still in the hearts of their parents. (We also have smaller hearts for many other loved ones who are no longer here on this earth.)
almost instantly became our greatest outreach, with hundreds listening to each episode. It takes several hours of both my and Dave’s time to put out each week but is so worth it, based on the amount of feedback we get on how a specific episode has helped a desperate parent. (These emails and comments have brought many tears and much rejoicing!)
speaker and singer Laura Diehl. She and her husband, Dave, are the founders of Grieving Parents Sharing Hope (
the others he met earlier who made fun of him for not being real.
real; from being who I was, thinking I was “real,” to being who I am now, on the other side of the suffocating darkness after Becca’s death. As I came out of the darkness and back into a place of hope and light, I began to see myself differently and I began to see others differently, along with a depth I didn’t have before. And that is a good thing.
Our children gave us a great gift. The gift to become truly real. I know so many parents who are much further on this journey than I am, who have said they would not want to go back to being the person they were before their child died.
how we are forever changed because our child died, but I want to ask: How are you different now because your child LIVED? What are the new lenses your child’s life gave you, helping you to see the world with a different view than you had before?
putting the death of Becca behind me! She will always be in front of me. Our children are our legacy. They are supposed to keep going when we leave this earth. Even if she isn’t with me anymore, I can’t leave her in my past and go on without her.
The first year of special dates is always difficult for anyone who has lost a loved one, but for a parent who has a child missing it can be almost unbearable. For us, Thanksgiving came first and brought with it the memory of how the year before, Becca had insisted on hosting the family, even though she was wheelchair bound. Then came Christmas, Becca’s favorite holiday, and then the pain of the first time she was not there to celebrate her birthday, and so on. Eventually it came around to the one-year anniversary of her death.
year be harder than the first! I see two reasons for this. First, I braced myself for those one-year markers. I knew they were going to be hard, so I tried to prepare myself for them mentally and emotionally. The second year it was more like I was caught off guard. I’ve been through this before; it should be better this year, I thought, so all of a sudden, those dates were here, and they just hit me like a brick wall.
Grief recovery for a bereaved parent? No, not really. Yes, it is possible to get to the point where we can have memories without the pain. It happens gradually, but for the rest of our lives there will be times where the pain returns, because all we have are the memories of our child. The goal is to have that happen less and less, but it is naïve to think we will get to the point where we no longer feel pain within the memories and therefore have “recovered,” as the article I read suggested.
speaker and singer Laura Diehl. She and her husband, Dave, are the founders of Grieving Parents Sharing Hope (
Up until last summer, my husband and I were blessed to have all four of our parents still here on this earth. (Dave’s dad passed last July, and my dad passed last month), so all four of them were still here on earth when Becca died.
prayed a lot, clinging to the only One who can really bring any comfort at a time like this. I am thankful for the One who can express my heart to the Father, when I don’t really even know how to pray (per Romans 8:26). 
hard on the mother of a child. It’s hard on all of us. But for me, I try to look past the death, and see where she (Becca) is today. Death is one thing all of us are going to face. Each one of us is going to die, and we know there is nothing we can do about it. It is actually part of living.
differently. I’m blessed to know that even though here, death separates us from our loved ones, up there, even death cannot separate us. I look forward to that, because I’ve got lots of ‘em up there. Knowing I am going to see them again softens the pain, but every time it leaves a mark.
