I’ve had a difficult time praying lately. You know how they say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result? That’s how I feel when I pray. Specifically when I pray to have a baby, to get pregnant, to conceive, to carry a child, to grow our family, to have biological children, to feel life in my womb… I have said it a thousand times in probably a thousand different ways. But the same thing, over and over again. Only to be met with another month. Once again sobbing to the few who refuse to grow tired of my tears. How many times have I been here? Three years, aka 36 months, or 1095ish days of that same prayer on repeat…It has been exhausting. It seems impossible that God could bottle up each one of those tears…I don’t know maybe there’s a reservoir, or a lake, or an ocean of my tears up there somewhere.
This cyclical praying and mourning does feel a bit like insanity. Each month I think, am I really doing this again, asking for the same thing, only to be left wanting each time… how am I supposed to stay sane? Beyond sane, how do I stay hopeful, choose to trust, have faith?
I love this definition of faith “a place of mystery, where we find the courage to believe in what we cannot see and the strength to let go of our fear of uncertainty.” (Brene Brown) “Believing in what I cannot see,” extends beyond my repetitive prayer for this singular desire of my heart. It’s believing for something bigger: that while I cannot see why any of this is playing out the way it is, I CAN believe for God’s promises of exceedingly and abundantly more than all I ask or imagine. Too often my feeble faith is misplaced on the gift and not the giver. And praying for strength to let go of my need for certainty? Choosing to trust that hope and peace can be found even amidst uncertainty? Oh how that would radically change my life, and definitely how I pray.
Perhaps my prayers are just too small. Maybe I need to pray more broadly for a faith that finds courage and strength amidst this sea of uncertainty. And maybe when you pray those bigger prayers on repeat it actually does make you insane. Not a crazy kind of insane, but an irrational and radical kind of insane. Irrational and radical faith that finds hope not by change of circumstances but by change of heart. Now that’s worth praying for over and over again.
