When Your Prayers Hit the Ceiling

Hi friends,

Thanks for taking the time to join me on my journey through C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. This summer, I’ve been using this small but powerful book almost like a devotional, sitting with one letter for a day or two and giving its message time to sink in.

As we move toward the end of summer, I thought I’d bring you along, sharing some of what I’m learning, what Scripture has to say about it, and what’s been tickling my mind along the way.

I may have told you this before, but when my eldest daughter Monika was a teen, she went through a period of reversing words as a secret language. As a nighttime ritual, “talk” became “klat,” so most nights before bed, we would lie on her Pottery-Barn-fashioned bed, klating for an hour.

Usually, we would recap the day. Often, though, it was her chance to share the feelings swirling in her heart and mind. Those conversations could be funny, serious, or a little bit of both. You never quite knew where a late-night “klat” would take us.

One night while we were klating, Monika brought up the topic of prayer. She was struggling because, as she put it, “My prayers feel like they hit the ceiling and fall back down on me.”

I’ve never forgotten those words. And after years of talking with women about prayer, I know Monika isn’t the only one who has felt that way. Sometimes we pray and don’t feel anything. God seems silent, nothing seems to change, and we start wondering whether He is even listening.

That’s what came to mind as I read VI of C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters this week. Screwtape is teaching his nephew, Wormwood, how to interfere with the prayers of his “patient.” Surprisingly, his strategy isn’t simply to stop the man from praying. If he can’t accomplish that, he’ll do the next best thing. He’ll get the man to begin navel-gazing.

Screwtape tells Wormwood, “Keep them watching their own minds and trying to produce feelings there by the action of their own wills.” Lewis then offers several examples. When we pray for courage, we start trying to feel brave. When we ask God to help us love someone, we try to manufacture feelings of love. When we confess our sin and ask for forgiveness, we look inward to see whether we feel forgiven, and, without realizing it, we’ve made our feelings the measuring rod by which we judge whether prayer has worked.

I think that’s where many of us get into trouble.

We live in a culture that places enormous weight on feelings. We say, “I don’t feel close to God right now,” and before long, that becomes “God can’t hear me.“ We don’t feel forgiven, so we wonder whether God has really forgiven us. We don’t sense an answer to prayer, so perhaps He isn’t listening at all.

But feelings make terrible theologians.

Feelings aren’t necessarily wrong, because God created us with emotions, and Scripture certainly doesn’t teach us to ignore them. A little time spent reading the Psalms is proof that emotions are a normal part of the human experience. For instance, David was afraid, angry, lonely, joyful, confused, confident, and discouraged, and sometimes all of those feelings within the span of a few verses. He didn’t hide those feelings from God. He brought them to Him. But there’s a significant difference between bringing our feelings to God and letting our feelings dictate what is true about God.

Monika may have felt like her prayers were hitting the ceiling, but that didn’t mean they were.

I love that the book of Hebrews presents a completely different picture. Because Jesus is our great High Priest, we are told to “draw near to the throne of grace” with confidence (Hebrews 4:16). Think about that for a moment. Scripture doesn’t say to approach confidently only when we feel particularly spiritual, have had a good week, have a consistent prayer life, or sense God’s presence. No! We approach the throne of grace not because our confidence is in us.

We approach the throne of grace because our confidence is in Christ!

Jesus is the reason we have access to the Father. That means the effectiveness of our prayers cannot depend on how we feel while we’re praying. We may feel as though our prayers aren’t making it past the ceiling, even though Scripture tells us we’ve been invited into the throne room.

Which one are you going to believe?

Another observation in this letter that caught my attention is Screwtape's point that humans tend to imagine demons putting thoughts into our minds, yet often their best work is accomplished by “keeping things out.”

Wow, note to self.

What if one of the enemy’s most effective methods in prayer isn’t to fill our minds with terrible thoughts, but simply keeping certain truths out? Perhaps his strategy is to keep us from remembering that God hears us, that Christ intercedes for us, and that the promises of Scripture are true whether we feel them or not. If he can keep our eyes fixed on ourselves long enough, eventually we may stop looking at Him altogether. How crafty, right?

And Paul tells us something remarkable in Romans 8. There are times when we are so weak that we don’t even know what to pray, yet “the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words” (Romans 8:26). Turns out that God isn’t concerned about our perfect prayers as much as we are. What a tremendous relief.

You see, prayer isn’t about performance. We don’t have to manufacture the right emotion, find the perfect words, or somehow work ourselves into a spiritual state before God will listen. Prayer is the privilege of a child coming to a Father who is near and yearning to “klat.”

This doesn’t mean our bodies or emotions are irrelevant. Lewis makes the opposite point. He reminds Wormwood that humans are embodied creatures and that what we do with our bodies affects our souls. Looking to the Bible, we see that God’s people kneel, bow, lift their hands, sing, weep, and sometimes fall facedown before Him. Even Jesus Himself fell on His face and prayed in Gethsemane.

Maybe some of us need to stop overthinking whether we’re “doing prayer right” and simply pray.

When you feel close to God, pray. When God seems silent, pray. When words pour out of you, or stop short, pray. When you feel forgiven, thank Him. When you don’t feel forgiven, confess your sin and believe His promise: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins” (1 John 1:9).

As Paul mentioned above, John does the same; he places our confidence not in our feelings, but in God’s faithfulness.

Perhaps that’s what Lewis’s fourth letter has reminded me of most this week. Prayer isn’t primarily about feeling something. It’s about approaching Someone. And the wonderful truth of the gospel is that because of Jesus, we don’t have to wonder whether our prayers made it through the ceiling.

We’ve already been invited into the throne room.

Your Sister in Christ,

Dawn