Ironically, my heart is the one pounding as I take her blood pressure. Pulse quickening with every second spent waiting for the cuff to release, the monitor to make its maddeningly characteristic “hiss” signaling the completion of another reading, I pray to soothe my desperate self.

I don’t know what I expect those mentally formed words to achieve in that moment. My wife’s specific blood pressure is already a reality while I pray, I just don’t know what the reading will show yet. Even my Omron BP monitor knows that number before I do—a trait it shares with the One I’m praying to (or maybe a trait that makes it the one I’m really praying to; if comfort from a number is truly what I seek, I might be better off asking God for a false reading and receiving—just as I sought—a false sense of security as my consolation).

In those moments, surely only ignorance is behind asking God for her blood pressure to be a certain way: it is a prayer that only exists as long as I don’t know the result. For who, seeing the result they feared, asks God that the number before them just not be true? (Well, this we also do, but I half suspect that what we really expect God to hear in that prayer is little more than our desperate cry for mercy in the face of unchangeable facts.)

Prayer Changes Things Pray-ers

To be presented with unchangeable facts does not mean that the present reality is unchangeable. All it means is that you are inhabiting actual reality: the only place where every unchangeable fact, in fact, actually is. Yet, change is the nature of prayer. 

Change is the nature of being a pray-er. We go before God in the posture of submission called prayer that we may be changed—that the quality of the lives of our loved ones and of this world be really changed. There could be no more dynamic desire behind prayer than such as these.

And yet prayer generally embodies the most static of postures, the most impotent of actions: stillness and quiet; words spoken in solitude, and paths walked without destination. What do we seek to change in the paradoxically active submission of the will known as prayer?

In my best moments, I seek mercy, not mastery; grace, not power; wisdom, not knowledge; peace, not plenty. I seek to be changed by the love of God as I face circumstances that the love of God has chosen not to change.

I seek to be changed by the love of God as I face circumstances that the love of God has chosen not to change.

How else might Almighty God move us to seek all this from Him alone unless, by necessity, it was He alone who knew all that we cannot know? That there even is an Omnipotent God means that our powerlessness orients us towards Him. And still, a recognition of this need of ours is not in itself enough for life, for the question remains: how will we let our need drive us?

For instance: I am seeking for my need to be fulfilled by a number when all my prayer concerns is the display of a blood pressure monitor. Do I pray because God is the only one who can do what I need or because God is the One I need?

Yes, our lackings move us to pray rightly not when we ask to have what belongs only to God (thereby removing the need for a prayer of dependence upon God in the first place) but rather when we are moved to pray only to have Him Who never lacks.

If ignorance moves me to prayer, let it not be for knowledge but for the wisdom to trust Him who knows all. 

If weakness moves me to prayer, let it not be for the power to remove the testing but for the grace to be sustained in every test by Him who is powerful.

If trials move me to prayer, let it not be for plenty to bring an end to my dependence but for the peace of knowing Him who is good in every trouble.

Prayer, the Place

It is not that God cannot change the so-called unchangeable facts of reality that I don’t attempt to influence them through prayer. For the Almighty, manipulating a blood pressure in response to a prayer before that prayer is even prayed is no obstacle (indeed, the Word would have us see a God who can stop the course of the sun in its tracks in response to prayer). And even still I find my spirit seldom moved to pray that way, favoring instead the Lord’s most powerful example of prayer.

In prayer, Jesus invites us into the Highest privilege he enjoys as the Son: union with the Father.

In prayer, Jesus invites his disciples into His own highest privilege that he enjoys as the Son of God: union with the Father. He may be heard speaking of this in locational terms, as a spiritual reality that our souls may inhabit the way our physical bodies inhabit a space:

“And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also…”

John 14:3

This “place” is the presence of His Father, and from that Place we may experience the reality that Jesus Himself inhabits. We may realize the relational power which Jesus realized on Earth in the divine communion of prayer to his Father—a reality we enter by nature of Jesus entering that Place on our behalf:

“…whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I am going to the Father.”

John 14:12

Later, in perhaps his most powerful and deeply personal earthly prayer, we see Jesus petitioning his Father that he may wholly inhabit this uniquely privileged location as the Son:

“…glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed.”

John 17:5

Then, astonishingly, the Lord extends this request of his right as divine heir to us, his followers:

“Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.”

John 17:24

The last prayer Jesus prayed with his disciples was that their souls might see him in his rightful place as the Son—that they might be given access to that holiest of Holies of the very presence of the inner life and love of God.

And it is for us, too, in prayer, that Jesus invites us on Earth to locate ourselves in the same intimate, privileged Place that he enjoys in the presence of God—that we may witness from the inside the reality-shaping Love of Father and Son.

Has Jesus informed us of a greater promise than this? Has he guaranteed us a better right to invoke than this most privileged position? Has he any greater answer to offer when we pray other than the one he already promised to give: his own presence, which—because he himself dwells in the presence of the Father—is the gift of inhabiting the Presence and the Love of God ourselves?

Apparently, if prayer could achieve all that we sometimes wish that it could, it would be a lesser gift than what we really have in prayer: a reserved place in the interpersonal space of God’s relational Love. Jesus would rather leave us with a Place where we can share communion with His Father with him than with a power to change a blood pressure by even one point.

Has Jesus anything better to offer us when we pray? If he had, wouldn’t he have told us?

Yes, and that is why he goes to prepare a Place for us.