What to Do When Your Prayer Has Become Mostly Complaint

Anne-Marie Wins started noticing her body giving

out on her. Her muscles were losing their strength, little by

little, and the doctors eventually called it myositis.

The disease that was taking her strength would not be going She

prayed the way anyone would, but her prayers had turned into one

long complaint. When a friend suggested she try thanking God

in the middle of it, something in her pushed back on that. She

told God straight out that she could not find a single thing to

be thankful for in this. The truth was, Anne-Marie wasn't

being difficult. She meant it. The thing was, she could see how

thanks and a body that was failing could be put together in

the same prayer. We'll come back to what you did next, but

first, welcome to Daily Devotions for Busy Lives. I'm

Bart Leger. slip into complaint, and some weeks I get closer to

that line than I care to admit. Two things pull me back. We live

in a sin-cursed world, and none of us was ever promised complete

health or a life free of struggle. And God is in control

of whatever comes, and He gives the grace to deal with me.

Now let me say something before anything else, because you need

to hear this from me. Prayer is one of the places God welcomes

your wants to hear about what's going on in your life and what

you feel is wrong. Scripture is full of people who told him at

length, and He didn't rebuke them for it. ..where they notice

that complaint is nearly all their prayer has been. Every

prayer is either asking for something or reporting what

hurts. If you could play back the last 30 days of your prayer

life, it would sound like a list of grievances instead of a

loving conversation. Nothing went wrong to make that happen.

..until the water has nowhere to go. Paul gave the Colossians a

short instruction for this. It's in Colossians 4: 2. Devote

yourselves to with an alert mind and a thankful heart. Look at

how Paul lays this out. Thanksgiving is inside the

command about prayer, right alongside devotion and an alert

mind. For Paul, thankfulness is part of the equipment you pray

with, the same way attention is. And notice what he never He

doesn't tell them to quit bringing God their trouble. Paul

wrote that letter from a prison cell. And a few verses later, he

mentions his own chains and asks them to pray about his situation.

So the man telling you to pray with a thankful heart was doing

it locked up and asking for help. Here's what makes this workable.

Thankfulness is a discipline. And a discipline does its job,

whether or not the feeling shows up that day. You don't have to

feel grateful to say something true about what God has done.

You just have to say it in his presence while the difficult

thing is there and maybe still unchanged. So, start with one.

One thing. Make it the first sentence of your prayer. Right

alongside with adoration. And then go on and say everything

else you were already going to What would you say? So,

Anne-Marie asked God to change her heart, and then she started

small. One morning, she prayed, "Thank you that I can still lift

my arms over my head and put on a shirt. Another day, thank you

that I could still bend on my shoes." The disease didn't back

off. Her muscles kept weakening. But her prayers stopped being

all complaint because now every one of them started with

something God had given her that day. She learned that thanks is

a sentence that you can choose to say even when nothing has

changed. Look at what she found to "Thank you that I can still

lift my arms over my head." That's a fact about that

particular morning, and it didn't cost her anything the

saying of it. It was true at seven o'clock whether or not she

felt anything about it. And look at what the story refuses to

promise you. The disease kept going. Her muscles kept

weakening. What changed was where her prayer started. Here's

today's challenge. Tonight, before you say anything else to

God, say one true sentence about something He's done or something

He has given you. Say it out loud to Him. Then, go ahead and

complain for as long as you need to. Do that every night this

week. You don't have to stop telling God how you feel. What

you're doing is adding gratitude for the blessings you do have.

And that's the whole assignment. Father, thank you that you take

our complaints and that you've never once told us to clean

ourselves up before we speak. Thank you that we can bring you

the worst of it without apology. For everybody listening whose

prayers have gone all one direction these past few months,

give them one thing today they can thank you for and let that

be where they start. And keep doing the work you're doing and

the things that haven't changed yet. In Jesus' name, amen. If

this episode encouraged you today, would you share it with

someone who might need to hear it? Just go to

dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/335 and copy the link. It only

takes a second and it might make a real difference in someone's

day. Thanks for joining me on Daily Devotions for Busy Lives.

Remember, God welcomes your complaint. Put one true thank

you in front of it tonight and see what a week of that does.

Come back next time for more encouragement to help you live

grounded in God's truth. Until then, God bless and have a great

day.