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I recently announced the birth of my little son. <3 Here's something I wrote when I was 22 weeks pregnant.
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So I'm 22 weeks pregnant (on average, you give birth at 40 weeks), and I started watching some youtube videos where women talk about their experiences giving birth. A few of them mentioned God helping them, or mentioned praying while in pain during labor, and honestly I was a bit startled because I haven't thought about prayer in a really long time.
And actually, as an ex-evangelical I feel really proud of myself for being surprised at the mention of prayer. I used to pray constantly. Look how far I've come.
As a disclaimer, I want to say that yes, prayer can be good and healthy for some people. If you want to pray while giving birth, or for any other reason, that is totally fine. But for me, it's so incredibly good to live without prayer, and in this post I'm explaining why.
Back when I was a good evangelical, I prayed all the time, and it was because I believed in an all-powerful God who was extremely personally involved in my life. I believed he was constantly working, in everything, all around me, that he had a grand plan involving all kinds of tiny details in my life.
I believed God could work miracles, just like in the bible. So much power, and always right there with me, ready to move mountains, if only God would choose to do so.
I prayed so much, and I believed he listened to me all the time, and loved me.
God was right there, and there were so many things I wanted him to do. Mostly it was about evangelism- I wanted SO MUCH for my non-Christian friends to "get saved." I don't believe in that anymore- I don't believe in a God who sends people to hell for having incorrect religious beliefs. Instead, the kingdom of heaven is one where people have the freedom to make their own choices about their personal lives and their religious beliefs and all that, and that's a beautiful thing. But back then, I prayed so hard that God would "work in their lives" by giving them little signs that would convince them that Christianity was true.
And there were other things I prayed for- like when I read the news and learned about some horrible situation happening... I had all sorts of ideas for how God should intervene and fix it, and I prayed so hard. About poverty, disease, human trafficking... about people dying in humanitarian crises, and I believed God was right there, sitting there all-powerful in the midst of these tragedies, and it would be so easy for God to DO SOMETHING and save people.
God was right there, all-loving and all-powerful, hearing every single word that I prayed. It would be so easy for God to intervene and do all the things I prayed for, perform all the miracles I asked, but for some reason he didn't. So I begged. I begged and begged, because there was always a crisis- my friends were in danger of going to hell, people are dying in tragedies all over the world every day- if there really is a God who is all-powerful and intervenes in the world in response to prayer, then it's logical that I should spend TONS AND TONS OF TIME every day begging and begging for him to DO SOMETHING.
Why wasn't he "saving" my friends? Why wasn't he preventing whatever disease epidemic was in the news? [note: oh ... wow ... I wrote this draft before COVID-19 was a thing...] Why? Why didn't he answer my prayers? And yes, Christians have all sorts of answers for this. Jesus promises "if you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer," but in the real world we see that that doesn't happen, and so Christians come up with all sorts of disclaimers to explain why your prayer didn't "work."
Maybe what you prayed for wasn't in "God's will." God's only going to do things that are consistent with his "will." Well then, one might ask, why should I pray anyway? Sounds like if God's only going to do things that are in his "will", then my prayers don't make a difference. Either it doesn't happen because it's not "God's will", or it does happen because God already planned to do it anyway. Ah, but when I was a good evangelical I knew the answer to this question: As you get to know God better and better, you will be more aligned with his will, and end up naturally praying for things in "God's will" anyway, and wow isn't that cool? Isn't it cool how God lets us get to know him, and we can start to get an intuitive sense of what his "will" is?
Well then, is God not answering my prayers because I'm actually praying for all the wrong things, the things that aren't "God's will", and that's because I'm not as close to God as I thought? Why? How could that be- I read my bible every morning, and I pray over and over all day. What am I doing wrong? I try so hard to "know God", "have a personal relationship with God", but apparently it's not good enough, apparently I don't know "God's will" and that's why my prayers aren't "working."
Is there some sin in my life that's damaging my relationship with God? What could it be? What did I do? Is it because I felt angry at someone? Is it because I downloaded a textbook instead of buying it? Is it because I have interests and desires that I care about, and that's "selfish" and those things are becoming "idols" and distracting me from God?
All these questions, and all of them impossible to definitively answer. Always stress and uncertainty about the status of my relationship with God.
And I haven't even gotten into the whole concept of "listening to God." See, a lot of times I prayed to ask God what I should do, when I was trying to make a decision. I prayed, and I sat quietly listening to God, and I analyzed all the little thoughts that ran through my head to try to figure out if they were from God, if any of them held the answer to "what should I do?" I looked for little signs everywhere- maybe my bible reading for that day contained some situation that sort-of maybe related to my situation, and God is trying to tell me I should do what the character in the bible story did.
Looking for signs everywhere, trying to figure out what God was telling me to do. Maybe a friend mentioned something, maybe I saw something in a movie, heard something in a song, remembered some random thing that happened to me years ago.
Because God was RIGHT THERE. All the time. All-powerful and all-loving, and he knew all the answers to all the questions I asked. And I begged so hard, and he loved me and was working in all the little details of my life... surely he was telling me what to do, and the problem was my inability to recognize it.
And that was how I lived back then. It was constant stress, praying, trying to figure out if I was praying correctly, trying to figure out "God's will", trying to figure out what God wanted me to do.
Imagine the stress of childbirth, and then adding the stress of prayer on top of that. There are choices I need to make, and I don't have the information I need to be certain about them. When should I start maternity leave? We don't know because we don't know the exact date I'll go into labor. When labor starts, when should we go to the hospital? What should we pack, to take to the hospital? Should I get an epidural? And probably a whole bunch of other decisions I haven't even thought about yet.
Oh I'm so glad I don't live that way. What if I thought God was standing right there and could totally help me, if only I knew how to pray the correct way and was aligned with "God's will"? What if I thought there really were absolute, certain answers available for all these questions, if only I analyzed every little thing to check if it was "God speaking to me"?
What if something went wrong, and I thought it was my fault because I didn't pray the right way?
It just feels SO GOOD to know that I won't have to deal with any of that. When I am giving birth to my baby, all I'll have is the reality of the situation right there in front of me. I'll have all the knowledge I've learned from researching reliable sources of medical information about pregnancy. I'll have the expertise from doctors and nurses that have years of experience.
I won't have certainty. I won't have answers about what will happen in the future. I won't have any way to be 100% sure that the choices I'm making are the best choices. I won't have the things that I used to believe I'd be able to get through prayer.
But I also won't have to speculate and worry and try to decode secret messages that God may or may not be sending me. I won't have to wonder if I'm praying right or "hearing God" right. I won't have to think what if God is telling me to make a certain decision but my "selfishness" or "pride" leads me to pretend I can't hear God, and so I end up doing the wrong thing.
Just reality. That's all. What a relief.
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