It seems like it should be pretty simple. If you’re Christian and you’re dealing with a problem, you ought to take it to God in prayer, right?
Right. And yet…so often, we don’t. It’s a pattern that the pastoral counselors at CatholicCounselors.com encounter again and again.
And on a recent episode of the More2Life radio show with Dr. Greg and Lisa Popcak, a caller named Colleen shared her own experience with this hesitation around prayer.
In confession, Colleen shared that she was hesitating to pray “because it hurts too much.” The priest advised her to push through that hesitation and pray anyway.
She took his advice, realizing that when she does, on the other side she inevitably experiences the “healing, hopeful, calming, release of my worry and my hurt.”
“I know I’m not alone” in shying away from taking her problems to God, she told the Popcaks.
She’s not, and the Popcaks used her call to talk about four common reasons that people avoid bringing their problems to God in prayer—and how to overcome those blocks.
Four Reasons People Avoid Prayer
1. You’re avoiding what you need to face
The most common reason is simple enough: we don’t want to think about the hard thing, so we don’t want to pray about it, either. If something is painful, revisiting it feels like making the pain worse.
“It’s all I’m thinking about, and if I have to actually bring it into words, I’m afraid it’s going to hurt even more,” Dr. Popcak explained.
But doing what Colleen’s priest advised (pray anyway!) is the way to go.
“It really is best to push through,” he continued, “because (when) we give God those particular problems, he gives us the grace to deal with them and think through them, and that’s a healthy thing to do, rather than running away and avoiding stuff.”
Staying away from prayer keeps the problem in the dark, where it tends to grow. Bringing it to God exposes it to the one who can actually heal it.
2. You’re performing piety instead of being honest
Many Christians grew up with the sense that prayer has to be reverent, composed, and properly packaged—“very polite,” as Lisa put it, and certainly not sharing any negative feelings you might be having.
She grew up in a family that took that approach to prayer.
“I grew up with a mother who was very, like, you have to talk to God a certain way, because he might get mad at you,” she said.
But when she met Greg, she saw how he prayed with total honesty through grief and struggle. “I was terrified when you were honest with God,” she recalled. “But what I saw is you never got hit by the lightning bolt. You actually got closer and closer to God when you were honest with him.”
Formal prayer is great, the Popcaks say, but it is meant to support, not replace, an open, honest relationship with God. When we pray in a way that guards our true feelings, that prayer experience can “hurt” because we’re not really connecting with God.
“God really wants an honest relationship with us,” Dr. Popcak said. “He would rather us yell at him and call him names and beat on his chest and scream and holler and talk about how much we hate him than not talk to him or just be polite.”
3. You keep asking God to take it away instead of asking what to do with it
God doesn’t always remove suffering; he often walks us through it, and those are different things.
As a little kid with terrible math anxiety, Greg wanted his parents to “just do the problems” for him. But no matter how much he cried and fussed, his parents never did. Instead, they sat with him, helped him calm down, and walked him through the steps.
“A lot of times, that’s what God wants to do with us,” he said. “He wants to walk with us so that he can show us how to be competent, how to not be afraid of things anymore, how he’s given us gifts to use.”
You can certainly ask God to take away your problem; after all, Jesus did that. But you should also pray that, if he doesn’t take the problem away, God will help you through it: “Show me how to respond to this in a way that will help me be my best self, in a way that will challenge the people around me to be their best self too, and glorify you.”
4. You know what God is asking, but you don’t want to do it
This is the one Dr. Popcak names from personal experience, offered with some humor. When prayer feels stuck and the other three reasons don’t quite fit, this is often the answer.
“I know in my heart of hearts what God’s actually asking me to do,” he said, “and I don’t want to do it because it’s scary, or because it’s painful, or because it makes me feel vulnerable. So then I get mad at God for asking me to do that thing.”
The solution is straightforward if not easy. “When I get over my big bad self and I do the thing, it gets better.” Prayer isn’t stuck because God is silent; it’s stuck because we already know the answer.
Trust the Great Teacher
If you find that you’re hesitating to bring your problems to God, think about whether one of these four common reasons might be at the root of the problem. Reframe the way you approach prayer, and as Colleen’s priest suggested, push through your hesitation.
“Really, what you’re doing is saying, I am going to trust in you, God, I’m going to trust that you love me enough to hear all my thoughts, all my feelings to be there for me, even when I’m angry at you,” Lisa said. “What you’re doing is inviting the Holy Spirit into all of it, so that you can deepen your relationship with God and you can find ways to find solutions.”
She continued: “We’re literally asking this great teacher to teach us how to be our best selves. We’re not saying, I’ll go back to God once I’ve become my best self. We’re actually going to him because he knows exactly where he wants to take us.”
For more help navigating personal and relationship problems with God’s help, connect with the resources and pastoral counselors at CatholicCounselors.com. And for help introducing your children to open, honest, everyday prayer, check out How Our Family Prays Each Day.