Article May 13, 2019 Issue

Agenda-free prayer

Susan Booth Mack Snipes

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, when I thought I was coming to God with a totally openhearted desire to know what it means to do God’s will, I discovered as I prayed that there was more of 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: “Enable me to know, God, that You are omnipotent and in control of all of Your creation.”

So turning to God without prerequisites—that’s really important to me. And one thing that helps me is a deep understanding of what God is, which I’ve been gaining through my study of Christian Science. Knowing what God is allows me to trust God. Knowing God as omnipotent good, lovingly governing all, enables me to trust that I don’t have to convince God to do anything. In that way, you could say my prayers are really more for me than for God. In other words, my prayers don’t function as a kind of jump-start for the Divine, but instead wake me up to, or help me 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 I am God’s perfect effect. And the more openhearted my prayer, the more powerful the results have been.

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