Yancey gives easy answers to hard questions about prayer

by Daniel Hoard, Staff Writer

Have you ever been to a party where someone traps you with an endless barrage of circular anecdotes? Now imagine that you went to a lecture where the presentation went the same way: an eloquent man enthusiastically telling endless, unconnected stories that somewhat revolved around the spiritual discipline of prayer. With that image in your head, you understand exactly the event that took place on the evening of Oct. 20 at the Calvin College chapel when author Philip Yancey, currently touring for with his new book Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference?, spoke on what he has learned in his research on prayer.

Yancey described himself as "a Christian writer whose profession is that of a journalist," thus giving him a certain amount of credibility. However, he presents himself as an average person who has researched prayer in various categories. It is with this humility of being relational to the average person that Yancey exhorted the audience to buy his new book, even though he is not a theologian.

Yancey asserted that prayer is all about learning “who I am” and “who God is.” Through prayer, he said, one can begin to engage with God as Jacob did. Yancey said that we are to understand that prayers are laments, and such engagements with God are good and fruitful. Furthermore, he said, prayer must be viewed as the remembrance of truth; it is the church’s role in the world to show those in the world what the truth is.

Yancey presented images of the church, the world, and prayer. When the truth can’t be seen on the big screen of the world, Jesus and/or the church highlight the truth the world needs to hear through smaller avenues. Additionally, Yancey said, we need to see ourselves within the prayers in the Bible, seeing the “me” in prayer — that is, we need to jump into the streams of prayer and grow from them.

Yancey also said that we must understand that the common person in prayer can bring about change. “It’s up to us” to bring about this change, he said. Prayer can be a difficult realm to navigate and present correctly to an audience and a place where Calvinism is seen as a positive perspective in light of debates between God’s sovereignty, providence, and predestination.

The greatest part of the evening was during the question and answer time. A man with Parkinson’s disease questioned Yancey about illness and prayer. Where was God with the illness, the man asked, and why did he have it? Questions about suffering, life, and prayer are hard ones, but Yancey gave an easy answer, when the only answer should have been the difficult response, “I don’t know.”

Such answers of uncertainty don’t sell books in the genre of Christian living. But they do ring true in the Kingdom of God.

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