When Did You Stop Praying for That?

Okay, so as I was preparing this message, I started thinking about something. And I thought it would be kind of cool to start off with this because maybe you can relate. You know how you lose people on social media? Like, you don't unfriend them, you don't block them, nothing really happens. You just stop clicking on their posts, you stop commenting, and before you know it, your whole timeline is just ads and strangers and that one person who posts way too much. And the friend that you used to talk to all the time, they're gone. There was no fight, there was no fallout, no decision to intentionally stop talking to them or following or clicking. They just kind of faded out. I've been sitting with that because I think the same thing happens with our prayer life. And honestly, that's part of what kicked off this new thing that I want to tell you about today. But before I get into it, let me stop for a second and back up. Hey guys, I'm Melissa, and this is my question for you. Okay, so today we're kicking off something new. It's our new six-part series that I'm calling The Prayers I Stopped Praying. And I know that title might land a little uncomfortably for some of you. Good. It does the same thing for me. Because if we're being honest, most of us have a list. We don't talk about it, we don't write it down, but it's there. It's prayers that we used to bring to God every day. Prayers we whispered through tears, prayers we said in the car or repeated like a heartbeat for years and years over and over again. And somewhere along the way, they got quiet. Not because you sat down one day and decided you were done. There was no funeral for that prayer. It just kind of it just kind of stopped showing up, like the friends that you stopped clicking on. So here's my question for you today. When did you stop praying for that? Okay, let me start by sharing with you something that happened to me a little while back. I was doing one of those things where you're just kind of in your head, half on autopilot, and I caught myself thinking about a situation I'd been praying about for a long time, like a long time. And that's when it hit me. I haven't prayed about that in I don't even know how long. Months, maybe, maybe longer. And it wasn't like I had a moment where I said, okay, I'm done with this one. There wasn't a fight with God about it. I didn't even consciously give up. I just kept living, and the prayer didn't come to me anymore. And what surprised me most wasn't that it had gone quiet. It was that I hadn't noticed. And the more I've sat with that, the more I've started to notice something. And I don't think it's just me. I think this is something a lot of us are quietly carrying and just not talking about. We talk a lot about prayer in church. We talk about how to pray, when to pray, what to pray for. But nobody really talks about the prayers that go missing. The ones that started out hot and ended up silent, the ones we brought to God a hundred times, and then one day we just didn't. It just stopped. And I think the reason we don't talk about it is because admitting a prayer went quiet feels like admitting something about ourselves, about our faith, about what we believed God would do or what we stopped believing. But here's the thing I don't think a stopped prayer is always a faith problem. Sometimes it's just exhaustion. You just ran out of words. Sometimes maybe it's disappointment. You asked, and asking again felt like setting yourself up for failure. Sometimes, and this one's a little bit harder to admit, sometimes it's that you got tired of the silence, and it felt easier to stop talking than to keep talking into what felt like nothing, to keep talking into something that seemed like it wasn't going anywhere. The question isn't whether you've got stopped prayers. Most of us do. The real question is what they're telling you. Okay, so I want to take you to a story in scripture, and I'll be honest, this is someone that I didn't really know that well going into this week. So if you're not familiar with her either, you're in good company. Her name is Hannah. And once I started reading her story, I honestly couldn't stop. Her story's in 1 Samuel chapter 1. And before I tell you about her, I want to say I came back to her story this week, and for some reason I just couldn't shake it. Not because it's beautiful, although it is, but because something about it kept poking at me. It stayed with me. All right, so Hannah wanted a baby. That was her prayer, the prayer of her whole life. But her body wasn't cooperating. Year after year, there was no baby. And in the culture she lived in back in that day, that wasn't just a private heartbreak. It was a public shame back then. Women who couldn't have children were treated like something was wrong with them spiritually, like maybe God was withholding a blessing for some reason that no one could explain. And to make it worse, her husband had another wife, and her name was Panina. And Panina could have children, lots of them. And she used it against Hannah. Scripture literally says Panina provoked her severely to make her miserable. Picture that for a second. Every year, when the family went to worship together, Panina would needle her. She would mock her and she would rub it in her face. So now picture Hannah. Years of disappointment. Her body was saying no. Another woman in her own household was making her life miserable on top of all of that pain. And she finally goes to the temple, the one place that's supposed to feel safe. And she breaks. She's crying so hard, her lips are moving, but no sound is coming out. And the priest there, this guy named Eli, looks at her and assumes that she's drunk. But she's not drunk. She's desperate. And here's the part that I just can't get past. After all of that, the years, the disappointment, dealing with Panina, the public shame, the priest who didn't get it, she was still praying. She's still showing up. She's still bringing the same prayer to a God who from where she was sitting sitting has not answered her. And when I read that this week, my first reaction wasn't, wow, that's that's true faith. My first reaction was actually a question. What did Hannah have that I had lost somewhere along the way? Because somewhere around year three, I think I would have folded. Somewhere around the time that Panina opened her mouth one too many times, I would have stopped going to the temple. And around about the time that the priest accused me of being drunk while I was pouring out my heart, yeah, I would have been done. But Hannah wasn't done. And I don't think she's in the Bible to make us feel bad about ourselves. I really don't. I think she's in the Bible to ask us a question we don't usually let ourselves ask out loud. What made me stop praying? Now, let me slow down for a second because this is where I think a lot of us could take this story in a direction it was never meant to go. And I really don't want us to do that today. It would be really easy to turn Hannah into some impossible standard, like be more like Hannah, and then we all walk away feeling worse than when we started. And that's not what we're trying to do here. Hannah wasn't superhuman. She wasn't a spiritual giant with some secret formula. She was a woman in deep pain who kept showing up anyway. That's it. That's the whole thing. But it does make me wonder what's different, because she had every reason most of us have to stop. But she didn't. Maybe what she had was just this a prayer she refused to let go quiet. Maybe she had a relationship with God that was honest enough to include the grief and the desperation and the complaint. And somehow none of it drove her away from God. It drove her closer toward Him. And a lot of us, and I'm including myself here, we kind of learned to do the opposite. When the prayer got hard, we got quiet. But when the answer didn't come, we stopped asking. And when the disappointment seemed like it was piling up, we let it be louder than our prayer. And the prayer somehow just faded out. Not because we decided to let it fade, just because we stopped showing up for it. And I'm not saying that to load anyone up with guilt, really. This isn't a guilt series. I'm not interested in guilting anyone into praying again. I'm honestly not. But I do want us to be brave enough to look because the prayers that went quiet are saying something about what we believed God would do, about what hurt too much to keep saying it out loud, and about what we gave up on. Sometimes we gave up on it for good reasons, sometimes for reasons we haven't even let ourselves examine yet. And before any of us decide whether to start praying again, I think we just have to be willing to take a deeper look. And honestly, that's the whole reason I wanted to do this series. So let me give you a quick map of where we're going to go over the next few weeks. We're going to look at the prayers that went quiet, the ones that died because God didn't answer the way we wanted Him to. We're going to look at the ones we're a little afraid to pray again because the last time we prayed something like it, God answered, and the answer was hard. It wasn't what we were thinking. The ones that we're tired of praying for other people who don't seem to be praying for themselves. I think we all have someone we can think, think about and relate to when that series comes about. And we're going to talk about the ones we stopped praying for ourselves because somewhere along the way, we decided we weren't worth them. And by the end of this series, my hope is that you find at least one prayer worth picking up again. Not because you have to, not because anybody, including me, is telling you that you should, but because that prayer might still be waiting for you quietly on the other side of the silence. So before we wrap up today, I want to give you something to do with this. And I'm going to tell you right up front, it's small, really small, and that's on purpose. But don't try to fix anything. I don't want you to make a list. Don't start praying everything you stop praying just because this podcast told you to. That's not the point. I just want you to notice what's one prayer you used to pray that you don't pray anymore. You don't have to put it in a journal. You don't have to tell anybody. Just sit with it. Just think about it and sit with it for a minute. And then ask yourself gently and honestly, when did I stop praying for that? Not why. We'll get to the why. But just when. Because sometimes naming the moment is the first step back toward the prayer. All right, one last thing before I let you go. Because if you take nothing else from this episode, I want this to be the part that stays with you. Hannah didn't have better faith than you. She just refused to let the prayer go quiet. And maybe that's what this whole series is really about. Not learning to pray harder, not learning some new technique, just learning how to come back to the prayers we've left behind and trusting that God can and will meet us there. So, this week, pay attention to your timeline. Pay attention to the friend who quietly disappeared, and pay attention to the prayer that did to go, if today's question stayed with you, I'd love to keep the conversation going. Each week, I send a short email called This Week's Question A Quiet Invitation, and it's a simple reflection to help you stay grounded, to pay attention, to dive deeper into God's Word, and to walk with God throughout your week. You can sign up at myquestion for you.com, bringing you encouragement for your spirit and wisdom for your walk.