A Prayer for When God Seems Absent:
Oh God, comfortable would we be if You gave us formulas and answered prayers and realized hope. But You call us beyond comfort.
But God, life upends us. We face divorce or miscarriages, financial struggles or job insecurity, and the people we love are tossed about by disease or loneliness or homelessness or addiction.
We are afraid. We don’t have adequate answers. And sometimes we can’t find You.
Or, we can’t find the person we hoped You would be.
May we learn to trust that You aren’t asleep on the job. That You haven’t forgotten us. That You are as near to us as our very breath. Give us the courage to press on. To suffer with hope that You have overcome the world.
May again and again we be awed by Your presence. That even when we feel like we’ve hit rock bottom, may we recognize we have fallen into Your arms because there is no place so deep or so dark or so scary that Your presence cannot reach.
In the name of the One who can still the seas with mere words, amen.
-- Kate Bowler and Jessica Richie
