October 31, 2022
Just like most other Christians, prayer was a big part of my life.
However, I often went back and forth with myself on if I was praying enough, or if I was praying correctly, or if I was praying in the way God really wanted. Later, as I began deconstructing, I started contemplating the purpose of prayer to a god who supposedly already knew everything about the world and, later, whether there was a god at all who was hearing a single word I ever prayed.
In this article, I’ll dive deep into what my prayer life looked like back when I was a Christian.
In high school, when I decided to start praying more seriously and more consistently, I would pray before bed. I never felt the need to get down on my knees at the side of the bed like they show on TV (does anyone actually do that?) but rather I’d say my prayers before sleeping. I’d pray for the benign things that a high schooler would pray for: good grades on tests, safety while driving, and for friends and family members who were going through hard times.
Sometimes, I’d doze off and fall asleep during these prayers. This made me feel guilty. It felt like I’d relegated speaking to God to the very final moments of my day, and even then I couldn’t be bothered enough to stay awake to see it through to the end.
I found a way to remedy this by saying small prayers throughout the day. I’d whisper them under my breath or think them quickly in my mind. I actually found I liked doing this a lot more; it felt like an ongoing conversation with God all throughout the day, which I preferred. I would eventually eliminate prayers before bed altogether and stick to the micro prayers throughout the day.
At one point, I started just praying the Lord’s Prayer as it’s written in the Bible. It’s stated that Jesus taught us how to pray, which was the Lord’s Prayer, and my hyper literal mind just started reciting it like a script handed straight from Jesus.
I did not like group prayers at youth group or Sunday school, but of course I would never admit that out loud. If I was called upon to pray, I’d make it short and sweet and wrap it up quick; I’d never decline. But my prayers were nothing like the ones from those who I could tell really liked to pray out loud in a group.
I’d always cringe when, if we took prayer requests beforehand, the person “went for it.” Meaning, he tried to remember and name all the prayer requests that had been mentioned in the group. I always considered that if he forgot one, then that person might feel left out. Almost always, he backpedaled at the end by saying something like, “and all the ones I haven’t mentioned—you heard them, Lord.”
Oof. Translation: they forgot your prayer request.
When I started the very beginning stages of my deconstruction, I stopped giving prayer requests before group prayers. I didn’t see the point whenever God was supposed to know everything already. Not only that, but I’d started traveling and had become aware that so many people in other places in the world had it worse than me. I thought there wasn’t anything I should be praying for as a person born and raised in the United States. I talk more about this in my article How My Belief in Christianity Slowly Fell Away.
At one point during my deconstruction, I came across an old article from Rob Bell. At that point, my church’s youth group had long since purged their youth room of Rob Bell books and videos after he’d released his book Love Wins. The article was something along the lines of “a year without God” or “a year without praying” in which Rob Bell wanted to put it to the test: not pray for a year and see what, if anything, changed.
I’ve never been a big follower of Rob Bell, then or now, so I don’t know how that ended up, but I have a pretty good idea.
I do not remember precisely when I stopped praying. I do remember that I never made a firm declaration that I was going to stop. I think my “micro prayers” throughout the day got less and less until they finally ceased altogether. And when they stopped, I probably didn’t notice they’d stopped until a couple weeks went by and I suddenly remembered that I hadn’t done them in a while. And, despite not having done them in a while, nothing about my life felt any different. Things went pretty much the way they were expected to go, and I hadn’t been struck down or punished or anything like that. I’d already been deconstructing for a while at that point, and many of my old beliefs about what Christianity was had fallen away, so it made sense at the time that I’d eventually give up praying as well.
These days, I talk to myself all the damn time, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. When I’m contemplating something or trying to work out a problem, I will pace around the room and talk through it out loud. I see this as kind of like a prayer, but instead of begging God to give me an answer or to give me what I want, I’m instead seeking guidance and wisdom from myself, my intuition, my own knowledge, and my own past experiences. And when I arrive at a course action through one of these out-loud conversations, it truly feels far more rewarding than any prayer session I ever had before.