If you’re anything like me, your prayers often run along the same lines. “Heal them.” “Meet their needs.” “Tell me what to do.” “Thank you.” And so on.
But have you ever prayed “outside the box?” Have you ever asked for something unusual, even outlandish? I posed that question to a group of friends, and their responses amazed and inspired me.
Rick once prayed about a woman he loved and hoped to reconcile with, in tears, saying, “If You can speak the heavens into existence, if You can part the Red Sea, if You can raise Your son from the dead—if You can do all these big things, certainly You can do something small, like bringing us back together again.”
God answered his prayer. Rick says, “I made tentative steps soon after that and when we embraced a couple of months later, I called it a miracle because it had been a nasty situation.”
Teri says, “It may sound silly but a few years ago I had to do a short round of chemo therapy and prayed, ‘Lord, I know I sound 15 years old, but please don’t let my hair fall out. You know that I need my hair to be a salesperson.’ My hair got even thicker than it was, and now I have to have it thinned professionally every 2-3 weeks.”
Robin was in college when she was waiting one late night in an empty building to meet a friend who was hurting deeply. Two hours later her friend hadn’t shown. She saw a roach on the ground, so she prayed, ”God, make that roach turn around and run towards the door if you want me to go home.” It immediately turned and headed for the door—and so did she.
Forty-three years ago, Charles and his new wife had to load up their car with all their possessions to move about 300 miles away. The car, however, was in such poor shape they never knew if it would even make it across town without breaking down.
“Before we pulled out of the driveway,” Charles says, “I put my hands on it and prayed it would last the trip. It never ran better.” Just a few weeks later, the car died and had to be replaced.
One October, Patty was in a demanding season of ministry and had no time to rake the leaves that had fallen in her large Massachusetts yard. So before an upcoming event, she says, “I asked the Lord if He could make it snow a little to hide the leaves. The next morning, the leaves were covered in snow.”
Serenity tells of boarding a plane at a time when she was feeling anxious and overwhelmed with emotion. “I prayed silently and fervently, ‘Lord, I cannot handle this, I don’t know what I’m going to do!’
At the end of my prayer, the pilot announced that we were going to have to deplane due to an issue with the restrooms and would have to wait to board a different plane.” The change of planes gave her the time she needed and the rest of the trip went without incident.
Sure, outside-the-box prayers may seem silly or strange sometimes. Of course, they do, because they are out of the ordinary, perhaps even contrary to some of our suspicions or beliefs about prayer.
But the Bible does urge us to “pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests” (Ephesians 6:18, NIV), so maybe praying for a roach to change his route or a blanket of snow or something similarly outside-the-box qualifies as “all kinds of prayers and requests!”
