‘Try Praying’ it says on the back of the buses in the UK. Let’s pray for peace says the new Archbishop of Canterbury, the Right Reverend Sarah Mullalley:
…let us pray and call with renewed urgency for an end to the violence and destruction in the Middle East and the Gulf… May all people of the region receive the peace, justice and freedom they long for.
It’d be nice, wouldn’t it, if the world was at peace. I’m just not sure how praying ‘with renewed urgency’ as Ms Doolally puts it will make much difference. Or praying at all. She might as well beseech her flock to keep happy thoughts uppermost in their minds. The peace she yearns for is not, obviously, for Ukraine and other of the world’s conflict hot-spots. Only a week before the Archbishop beseeched The Lord for an end to (selective) violence and destruction, Muslim terrorists had again massacred Christians in Nigeria. Perhaps the Rev Malarkey didn’t pray urgently or with sufficient renewal because God evidently ignored her pleas. He makes no attempt to rescue even his own people; either that or he’s incapable of doing anything about megalomaniacs and murderous zealots. You’d have thought if he was opposed to us slaughtering each other he’d have put a stop to it already, what with all the urgent prayers down the centuries.
Meanwhile, over on the Dark Side, Pope Leo XIV has been assuring his devotees that God does indeed ‘reject violence’. This surely can’t be the God of the Old Testament who loves a good set-to, can it? Nor the God of the New who supposedly sent his son to be violently executed by the Romans. Nor the God of Revelation who plans to send that same gentle Son to slaughter most of humankind. God’s propensity for ‘violence and destruction’ is renowned and Leonardo has let that Oscar go to his head if he thinks otherwise. After all, any number of his predecessors have rolled up their finest-silk sleeves for a good old holy war, with God on their side of course.
Still, if those posters and the Rev Mullalley think prayer is our best hope, maybe I should try it. That bus isn’t going to get here on its own.
rejectingjesus, 
I once answered a young person who asked similar questions with this: Prayer changes things, and the thing most in need to change is me.
The truth is, prayer is not a shopping list we present to the Lord or an attempt twist his arm to get sunshine on a day we planned a picnic. It is a way to align ourselves with God’s desires. But prayer is interactive, and so God may give us what we want on his way to achieving what he wants.
The sunshine I wanted, I realize now was trivial. There are bigger things to pray for. I learned.
So, what does God want? In one word, salvation. But he achieves that by means. Neil noted that evil often wins, or seems to. Why would God allow that? Well, look around. When things are dark, we seek the light. When the world is at war, we recognize how evil evil is. We hear of 165 schoolgirls killed in Iran by our bombs, and we recognize that this is not the way God made the world. When we hear of Christians killed in Nigeria, we know in our souls there is something going wrong here. And some of us turn to God who has a better way. It changes our lives. That is one means of countering evil, doing things his way.
Such praying often also results in down to earth action. When we come to the conviction that evil is evil, we are often moved individually to act in whatever way we can to shine the light of goodness into the darkness by going and doing good. That is the means that answers our prayers. I have friends who went to Africa and spent a lifetime there to heal the sick and hurting. They left as their legacy a hospital and staff and programs in Kijabe, Kenya, to heal the sick even after they were gone. It was a forty-year miracle and the answer to the prayers of many. Prayer does work, but sometimes in ways we do not anticipate.
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Dat you, Don? You not read my comment telling you I wasn’t going to publish ‘anonymous’ comments any more? Yet here your are, Anonymous. I can tell it’s you from the writing style: long-winded and waffly. This is the last time I’m approving you in your anonymous guise.
Only two things to say: you’re arguing with the Archbishop of Canterbury, not me. She’s the one who thinks Chiristians can ask God for whatever. She is of course correct; Jesus himself supposedly said, ‘Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.’ If only he and the Archbish had you around to explain what prayer is really all about.
And we all know you have friends who save Africa/India/the world, because you keep boasting about them. But what about you? You sell all you have to give to the poor? You take yourself off to the back of beyond to build schools and hospitals? If not, why not? Isn’t that the sort of thing your Saviour compels you to do? Or does he actually mean something else entirely, just like he does with prayer?
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