I have a few questions about the God who finds people parking spaces.

For starters, what happens when two Christians are praying for the same space? Does the one who tithed get it? Is there a seniority system? And if somebody backs out just as I pull up, am I supposed to assume God has taken time away from the considerable suffering in the world to save me forty steps outside the Harris Teeter?

I know. It’s a parking space. People are just expressing gratitude. I’m not suggesting we interrogate everybody who says, “Thank God,” when something goes their way. I’ve said it myself. But sometimes there’s a whole theology tucked inside that little expression, and it gets considerably less charming once we move beyond the grocery store.

Because the same God who supposedly made sure I didn’t have to walk across the parking lot gets asked to save somebody’s child. And when the child dies, we suddenly have a much more complicated explanation of how prayer works.

That’s where I want to spend some time. Not with the person praying. With the people who told them what prayer would do.

Please Check Your Faith Before Calling Again

If you’re frightened, hurting, or watching someone you love suffer, pray however you need to pray. Beg. Get angry. Sit there without a word. Nobody in that situation needs a pastor leaning over their shoulder to correct their theology. You’re trying to make it through something awful, and reaching for help is a profoundly human thing to do.

What troubles me is the promise that gets attached to that reaching. Pray with enough faith, and God will heal. Get enough people praying, and something will happen. Keep believing. Don’t let doubt get in the way of your miracle. It can sound encouraging, especially when you desperately need encouragement. But listen to what the promise requires you to believe about yourself if the miracle never comes.

You didn’t have enough faith. Somewhere along the way, you doubted. There must be something in your life you haven’t surrendered. The details vary, but the person who is already suffering ends up responsible for explaining why the promised help didn’t arrive. God’s reputation stays intact. The preacher’s promise stays intact. You get to wonder whether your loved one would still be alive if you’d been a better Christian.

What a cruel damn thing to do to someone.

And no, everybody who believes in divine intervention doesn’t do this. Plenty would be horrified by it. Still, if we tell people that sufficient faith secures a particular outcome, we’ve left that accusation sitting there whether we ever say it out loud. A person can turn it on themselves long after everybody else has gone home.

Who Gets Moved to the Front of the Line?

We should also be careful about the explanations we give when something good happens. I understand wanting to call it a blessing. Sometimes gratitude needs somewhere to go, and the language we grew up with is the language we reach for. But there’s a difference between being grateful that someone recovered and being certain that God selected them for recovery because their church organized a particularly effective prayer chain.

Follow that explanation far enough, and you have to ask about the person down the hall. They were loved, too. People prayed for them, too. Did they need a larger church? More persistent friends? A pastor with a better connection? I’m being sharp about it because the implications deserve more attention than they tend to get when we’re happily telling the success story.

We can celebrate a recovery without making it evidence that somebody else failed. We can also admit that we don’t know why one person got better and another didn’t. That admission may feel unsatisfying. It certainly won’t sell as well as a book promising the prayer that changes everything. But it leaves a grieving family with one less burden to carry.

There’s an understandable resistance here. If you’ve experienced something that felt like an answer to prayer, you don’t want somebody taking it away from you. I’m not asking you to pretend the experience meant nothing. I’m asking us to consider how much we actually know about what happened before we use our experience to make promises to somebody else.

The God Behind the Promise

This is really a question about providence, which is the theological word for how we understand God’s activity in the world. You can avoid the word entirely and still have an opinion about it. Every time we say God arranged something, allowed something, or could have stopped something, we’re saying something about providence.

I’ve changed my mind about it more than once. In childhood and early youth, I believed in an all-powerful God. Later, I moved toward the idea that God chose to refrain from intervening so we could have genuine free will. That was closer to where I was when I wrote the introduction to the prayer book that grew out of my ThD work. I was already rejecting the Great Vending Machine in the Sky, but I was still working through what divine power might mean.

The difficulty with voluntary restraint is that eventually you have to ask why God wouldn’t make an exception. Surely there are circumstances in which protecting someone matters more than preserving the freedom of the person hurting them. If God could step in, what makes staying out the loving choice? I couldn’t just tuck that question under “free will” and consider it answered.

These days, I’m more in line with theologian Thomas Jay Oord’s essential kenosis. The name is a mouthful. The central distinction is that God’s self-giving love makes unilateral control impossible. That explanation is a mouthful, too. Oord understands love as giving others real freedom and agency, which God cannot simply withdraw when things go wrong. That isn’t a rule God has decided to follow. It’s part of what it means for God to be loving. God is active, influencing and empowering creation toward good, but God cannot singlehandedly determine what happens. That’s different from possessing the ability to stop suffering and choosing not to use it.

I don’t expect a paragraph to settle that for anybody. It hasn’t answered every question I have, either. But it has changed the question I bring to prayer. I no longer picture God holding back help while waiting for us to make a convincing enough case. The person in pain doesn’t need to earn God’s concern, and their friends don’t need to drum up enough interest to get the request noticed.

What We Can Actually Offer

For those of us who are pastors, or simply people who want to help, this means being more honest about what we can promise. We don’t know that everything will be okay. We can’t guarantee healing. Sometimes we’re afraid to admit that because it feels like we’re taking away the last bit of hope somebody has. But hope can survive honesty. The promise of a guaranteed outcome can leave a person with an awful lot to untangle when it falls apart.

In my prayer book (don’t rush out and buy it; it needs much better editing), I connect prayer with action. I still believe prayer can draw our attention to suffering and move us to respond. But I want to be careful here, too. We cannot replace “you should have prayed harder” with “you should have done more.” Some people are already doing everything they can. Some barely have enough strength to get through the afternoon. They don’t need another assignment from us.

Those of us with strength to spare can do something useful with it. Find out what they need. If they want company, stay awhile. If they need groceries, get groceries. And if they want to pray, pray with them without turning it into a prediction. There is room for their fear, their hope, and their anger without requiring any of it to produce a result.

If the person beside the hospital bed asks whether this happened because they didn’t have enough faith, they deserve a clear answer: no. They did not fail the person they love by praying badly. They’re already wondering how they’ll get through tomorrow. The last thing they need is a preacher making them wonder whether they caused today.