Suffering and Prayer: How to Accept God’s Outcomes

Whether we have prayed for a job interview to land us the dream job or prayed for a sick loved one to be healed, we know what it means to breathe our soul’s longings to God and expect him do whatever we have prayed for. Yet many of us also have experienced the feelings that come with those prayers having an outcome that was not part of our prayer: the loss of a job, the sick dying, the marriage ending, or life crumbling. We may reach a conclusion that God did not hear our prayers, or if he did, then he chose not to answer them. While this may feel very true, maybe there is another way to consider the outcomes we have experienced or are experiencing.

The Prayers

When I was nine, I wrote out a prayer to God to heal my dad from cancer. God did not heal him, and my father died. Then when I was ten, I began a fervent prayer that my mom would not get cancer and die. I prayed that prayer literally every day. When I was twenty-four, she was diagnosed with cancer and died nine months later. It appeared God had not heard any of the tears or cries of my anguished soul.

For many years I was confused and felt very defeated especially after my mother died. I would hear the church preach to “Cast all your cares on him because he cares for you” (1 Peter 5:7) or “anything you ask for in his name, he will give it to you” (John 14:14). I believed I had done that and still had not been heard. I thought I had prayed with strength and faith, and, yet my mom was gone. I really did not know what the point of prayer was. Praying felt more like a crap shoot than anything else. Maybe God would hear me today and maybe he would not. I just did not know.

This may be where you are now. You have prayed for your marriage, your child, your life, your sanity, and, like David, are worn out from your groaning (Psalm 6:6). You may feel God is using an eightball to decide whether to answer, or not, the prayers you bring him. While our frustrations, pains, and experiences of facing what appears to be passed-over prayers is real, we can also still hold to the truth that “The Lord has heard my cry for mercy; the Lord accepts my prayer” (Psalm 6:9) even if the outcome is not what we anticipated.

How to Accept God’s Outcomes

1)        Be present in the pain

When we or those we love are hurting, we cry out in desperation to God to heal, make whole, change, and whatever else we believe is needed to stop the pain. We pray in earnest and faith at the helm of our cries. However, we can become so lost in God answering the way we intend that we commit spiritual bypass on ourselves and possibly others.

Implementing quick spiritual quips and mantras or only portions of scripture, we try to relieve our own or others’ pain through bypassing the reality of ours or others’ situations. However, this cannot be sustained and can bring more harm than good. To minimize this, we need to face the reality of our experience.

David was an expert at facing the reality of outcomes he did not want. Psalm 13:1-2 David proclaims, “How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?...How long will my enemy triumph over me?” David did not hide his real thoughts about matters. With God, he wrestled with his prayers for rescue while sitting amid his anguish with his enemies facing him and remained present with those feelings.

David being in tune with his feelings did not mean God was going to give a different outcome. However, this presence allowed David to move through his grief of things not turning out as he intended. It allowed him also to draw closer to the Father because the relationship was real and raw.

 2)        Thy will be done

Often when we are facing suffering or someone we love and care about is, our first instinct is to rescue. Our prayers are often piled with requests of healing believing that is God’s will too. Because why would God want anyone to suffer?

Curt Thompson in his book The Deepest Place: Suffering and the Formation of Hope states, “For indeed, if God’s glory is so, well, glorious, how is it that my suffering remains in its presence? What am I missing?” Sometimes we are missing nothing. Sometimes the “why” of suffering is beyond our comprehension. The harder and louder we scream our prayer of rescue to God, the less heard we often feel. It is in this hollow place that we may find the firmest foundation.

God does hear our requests and provides us the opportunity to come boldly before the throne bringing all requests to him (Hebrews 4:16; Philippians 4:6-7). He bottles our tears (Psalm 56:8). There is no part of our anguish with which he is not familiar. Yet, because he sees beyond any time frame we can as well as circumstances we can, we can firmly rest knowing that God’s ways are higher than ours and pray with faith that his will be done, even if his will does not turn out as we hoped.

 3)        Trust

I could speak eloquently and with authority on this matter giving the most profound answers only found with the great philosophers, and you may reply, “So what? It still hurts.” And you are right. What do we do now then? Trust.

God is aware of our pain, our suffering. There is nothing of which he is not aware. He knows our coming out and our going in (Psalm 139) and deems us worthy of being known (Matthew 10:29-31; 1 Peter 2:9). His love for us is deep and wide (Ephesians 3:18) and nothing can separate us from him (Romans 8:38), not even our suffering.

We may not understand why we or someone we love is suffering, but we can trust that our Savior is with us even in these times. God has not changed in two thousand years; he isn’t changing today either.

4)        Perseverance

Romans 5:3-5, tells us that we have an opportunity to “boast in the glory of God.” And sometimes that glory is brought about through our sufferings (vs.3). Through the suffering we become acquainted with the perseverance, character, and hope we truly have in Christ.

I cannot have certainty as to why my family was taken from me so early, why I faced abusive relationships, why my hearing was failing, experienced spiritual abuse, and more. But I can say that those events have transformed me. They have allowed me to have true understanding of other’s sufferings and allowed me to know that those sufferings were not the end of anyone’s story.

While is it is hard to persevere while suffering, it is not impossible. Some days we are focused on the suffering, and other days we are focused on the persevering. Regardless of which we are holding to, we can rest assured in the hope of God. We can have the hope, “as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure…where our forerunner, Jesus, has entered on our behalf” (Hebrews 6:19-20). We can rest assured that even in our suffering that God is fighting for us (Exodus 14:14).

Final Thoughts

We may never have an answer to suffering on this side of heaven. We may wrestle with bringing our requests to God while also consenting to “thy will be done” (Matthew 6:10). Yet through these moments, we can have outcomes of perseverance, hope, presence, and trust in our Father who is “close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crusted in spirit” (Psalm 34:18).

Challenge Questions:

1) How do you define suffering?

2) How have you seen God work in your suffering?

3) Are there prayers you have seen God answer? How did he answer those?