I remember sitting on the floor of our youth building one Sunday morning while one of the dads who attended our church led a small group for me and four other boys. I was bored, I was ready to leave, and I was hoping he didn’t ask me if I memorized the Bible verse from last week; because I didn’t. I was around twelve years old and had just begun a dark and weary descent into what I didn’t know would be a six-year battle with severe depression. All I knew was this; I didn’t want to sit around with people who didn’t know me and act like everything in my life was okay. I was sick and tired of being sick and tired, and I no longer wanted to pretend like my life was just dandy.
I felt a little embarrassed for sharing my heart with a group of people I really knew nothing about, but I felt that sharing my pain was probably the best way to find healing for it. To my surprise, it seemed that not even the small-group leader knew how to handle my honest response to his question, and his reaction to my cry for help is something I have never forgotten. He looked at me and said, “Well, Jarrid. I’d encourage you to just pray harder. God will take care of it.”
Yup… That’s all I got.
When you tell someone who is hurting “You just need to pray harder,” what you’re really saying is, “You’re not praying hard enough”—which in itself is a false depiction towards the way God moves in the lives of everyday people. If God answered prayers by how hard someone is to pray, then God would be a transactional genie and not an almighty and sovereign God. Sure, God responds to our prayers, but he isn’t controlled by them.
I remember going home defeated, thinking that my already shaky faith in God was actually worse than I thought it was. I felt insulted, not good enough, and that my small-group leader had just confirmed everything I had already thought about myself; that I was a broken and sucky Christian. I’m assuming this was one of the many experiences that attributed for my years of distaste towards God and church.