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Unanswered prayer – is there such a thing?  I have been meditating on it all day.  I recently read some writing of a friend and he was giving his thoughts on Psalm 77.  His reflections were powerful and he had asked some great questions.  As I reread through the chapter and his reactions, I could not help but process through this idea of unanswered prayer.  Is there such a thing as unanswered prayer?

I had just thought through Nouwen’s idea of creating room for God so those ideas were fresh in my mind.  As I thought through the reflections on Psalm 77 and this idea of Nouwen’s room, I was struck by the idea that if prayer was truly about communion with God and intimacy with Him; if prayer was creating space for a Christ-like transformation, then there’s no such thing as unanswered prayer.

This was pat of my response to my friend’s reflections:

Prayer in and of itself is not an answerable thing. If it is we must not be praying right. Even in Psalm 77 – the psalmist is working it out. It is an intimate interchange between him and God. And God – even in the seeming silence because the

psalmist cries out to God to hear him – makes himself evident still in the waters, the depths, the clouds, the skies, the thunder, the arrow, the whirlwind, the lightning, the earth, and the seas. The psalmist cries out for God to hear him and in his crying out realizes the presence of a God who was always there. It wasn’t unanswered – the psalmist was too blind

to see it.

Inherent in unanswered prayer is prayer that requests and asks for things. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this kind of prayer. I guess prayers such as this can go unanswered, but prayer as communion with God can’t really go unanswered.