Answered Prayers

In the worst year of his life, a clergyman made God a promise.

He had lost his job, then his house. The phone rang all day with creditors. Near the bottom he found a can of soup marked down to ninety-nine cents, ate it, and thanked God for what he expected would be his last meal. He promised that if God carried him through, he would write down what the darkness had taught him about answered prayer.

This book keeps that promise, many years late.

He offers no method, and he distrusts anyone who does. He had a method once. He had been taught that the mountain would move if he spoke to it with enough faith, and when it did not move, the only place left to look for the fault was himself. He has spent the years since sitting with people that teaching quietly crushed. They come ashamed, certain their faith was too thin or their lives too unworthy. Hear this plainly. Prayer is not a test you failed.

Answered Prayers follows one journey through four movements: the asking, the waiting, the answer, and the Giver. It takes the hardest cases first. A prayer the author has carried for most of his adult life has never been granted. A woman prayed thirty-eight years for her husband, and the answer came in his final week. And in a garden, the sinless Son of God asked for a cup to pass, prayed with perfect trust, and drank it anyway. Scripture says He was heard. Any account of answered prayer that cannot survive that garden is wrong.

What emerges is a book about what God actually does with a prayer. Sometimes He gives the thing asked for. Sometimes He refuses. Sometimes He gives what nobody thought to request. And always He is at work in the person who asked.

If you are carrying a prayer that has gone unanswered for years, bring it into these pages. You already know which one it is.