Hoping out loud
By Lorna Beckwith, Editor · · 5 min read
Picture a grandmother at the kitchen table, writing her grandson's name in a notebook. He has gone quiet lately. She wants to call, but she does not want to pry, and so she writes his name, pauses, and asks God to help her know what to say.
Now picture the same page with a different sentence on it: "My grandson and I are close again." Written as though the thing she longs for has already happened. The notebook has not changed. The expectation behind it has.
That is where a conversation about manifesting and prayer gets interesting, and I want to be careful about what I mean by the first word, because it is used loosely. Here it means the idea that picturing a desired future, or speaking as if it is already yours, can help bring it about. If you mean simply naming a goal and working toward it, that is a different claim and I have no quarrel with it.
A prayer journal and a page of affirmations can look much alike on the table. The resemblance only takes us so far. In Christian prayer we are speaking to someone, who may not give us the answer we want, and that matters most when the hope on the page involves a person we love.
There is nothing wrong with wanting
Maybe you want your daughter to call without needing a favor. Maybe you miss having someone across the breakfast table. Or perhaps you are worn out from being the dependable one and would like, just once, for someone to notice.
Those can be uncomfortable things to admit, even in prayer. "Help me be grateful" may feel easier to say than "I'm lonely." You can mean both. Gratitude for your family does not cancel the wish to hear from them.
A reader told me once that she had prayed for twenty years for her son's return to church and had never once prayed for him to call her, because the second seemed selfish, and that she had only recently understood that the two prayers were about the same boy and that God had probably noticed.
Writing a hope down gives you words to look at, and the words sometimes tell you something: that what you called worry is partly hurt, or that what you have been asking for is something you could also say to the person involved. The page may not tell you anything new. It can still be a place to be honest, and there is room for that honesty in the faith I was raised in. You can ask for a particular outcome. You can ask again tomorrow. You do not have to pretend that any answer would suit you equally well.
When hope becomes another burden
The trouble starts with the suggestion that your thoughts can secure the outcome. Follow that idea far enough and an unanswered hope becomes a personal failure. Perhaps you pictured the wrong thing. Perhaps a doubtful afternoon undid a week of effort.
Consider what that asks of a woman waiting for difficult news. She is already afraid. Now she has to be afraid of her fear, too, as though admitting it could make something bad happen.
We should be careful with religious language here as well, since it can do the same work by another route. Telling someone to "just have more faith" puts the same burden on her. A disappointing answer does not give the rest of us permission to judge how well she prayed.
In prayer, fear can be part of the conversation. So can anger, and the admission that you do not know what to ask for anymore. God is not someone you have to persuade by sounding cheerful.
And the people we pray about have choices of their own. The grandmother at the table can reach out to her grandson. She cannot decide how he will respond. Loving him includes leaving him that freedom, even when the waiting hurts, and I suspect the waiting is the part no notebook was ever going to fix.
Start with the unfinished sentence
If a blank page feels like too much, try writing "God, what I'm hoping for is" and finishing it in your own words. It does not need to sound like something you would say at church.
God, you know why this matters to me. I don't know how it will turn out. Help me see what I can do, and help me live with what I can't decide.
Then consider whether there is something for you to do: make a call, offer an apology, ask for help, let somebody bring the casserole. If there is no useful step today, you can close the notebook. You have not failed an assignment.
After you close the notebook
In our imagined scene, the grandmother might send a short message: "Thinking of you today. I'd love to hear how you're doing when you have a minute." Then she has to let it be a message, without turning it into a test of his love or of her faith, and that may be harder than writing the prayer was. The phone is still there. She may check it more often than she meant to. An anxious afternoon does not erase the sincerity of what she said that morning.
She can keep hoping he calls. If he does, she can listen. If he does not, she can tell God she is disappointed, in those words, and tomorrow's page has room for the same name.
The grandmother and the grandson are an imagined example. The notebook, in most of the kitchens I know, is not.