Agenda-free prayer

It’s not always easy for me to drop my own agenda – including when it comes to prayer. Maybe you know the feeling. For instance, one time, I discovered that I had a multiple choice prayer going on: “Thy will be done, God, as long as it’s either A, B, C, or D.” In that moment, I was able to laugh at myself and then truly offer an agenda-free prayer.

Turning to God without prerequisites – that’s really important. And one thing that can help us is a deep understanding of what God is. Knowing what God is allows us to trust God. Knowing God as omnipotent good, lovingly governing all, enables us to trust that we don’t have to convince God to do anything.

In other words, our prayers don’t function as a kind of jump-start for the Divine, but instead wake us up to, or help us become more aware of, God’s love and power, which are always present and operating.

Years of practicing this agenda-free prayer have taught me that one of the most helpful things I can do is to be more openhearted in coming to God – to climb into the arms of divine Love with no other desire than to remember that God is the one perfect cause and we are God’s perfect effect – His perfectly complete and spiritual children. And the more openhearted my prayer, the more powerful the results have been.

Why is this so? Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered Christian Science, lays it out in this statement from “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures”: “One infinite God, good ... leaves nothing that can sin, suffer, be punished or destroyed” (p. 340). So we don’t need an agenda, because the infinitude of God, good, excludes anything unlike good. How can there be evil or suffering when good is infinite? In truth there can’t be. And even a glimpse of what it means that there is one infinite God, good, is powerful enough to heal – powerful like light naturally dispelling darkness.

So what about those times when we struggle to give up our own agenda? It’s been comforting to me to realize that even Jesus faced such struggles. In the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus prayed fervently that he might avoid the crucifixion. It took some deep letting go of his own will to finally be able to say, “O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt” (Matthew 26:39).

There’s something so encouraging about that word “nevertheless.” Even when we feel as though we can’t completely give up our agenda in our prayers, perhaps, like Jesus, we can at least keep yielding up that agenda, knowing that God, good, always takes care of us. So often I’ve been breathtakingly surprised by how the messages I hear from God seem unrelated to the problem I’m having, yet they uncover and correct the exact misunderstanding of God’s infinite allness binding me to a limited sense of health, supply, or whatever the issue may be. Because ultimately, any problem we face is always some misconception about God and His allness needing to be corrected in our thinking.

For example, while we were on a family trip, I had a slight pain in my lower back that became constant. As I went about my busy day, I affirmed God’s tender care for me, and later I found some quiet time to get still and listen humbly to God – to just feel close to God. It was a simple, wordless prayer of gratitude for moments of conviction that God is Spirit and that everything He creates, including me, is spiritual and good.

God’s message to me came as a feeling of deep joy and profound love – like a warm blanket wrapping me up – and a reassurance that there is no problem in the whole universe that isn’t answered by feeling Love’s omnipresence. And in that moment, the back pain simply melted away for good. It felt so natural – not like a big “yippee!” but so right and necessary because God, Love, is All.

The book of Isaiah assures us that God doesn’t need our input in order to care for and comfort us: “It shall come to pass, that before they call, I will answer; and while they are yet speaking, I will hear” (65:24). The most effective prayer leads us to commune with God and to feel what is already true from the viewpoint of this infinite Mind. The “how” of this powerful prayer is to accept the intactness and wholeness of good – right where we are. No agenda needed.

Adapted from an article published in the May 13, 2019, issue of the Christian Science Sentinel.