Reclaiming Sanityনমুনা

Prayer - In the 'War Room' with Jesus

Have you seen the movie War Room? It’s a 2015 film starring Priscilla Shirer. Her character, Elizabeth, meets an older woman named Miss Clara who has a prayer closet in her house. The movie is all about the power of prayer and the amazing blessing of keeping track of prayer requests, which I invite you to do for yourself. Each day we walk with Jesus, we can lean into His great love and learn more about what it means to pray without ceasing (1 Thessalonians 5:17). We can wake up in the morning and talk to God throughout the day, listening to His words of wisdom and prompting of great love in the pages of Scripture. We might pause and then chat a little more. Sometimes, we might cry and argue. We can lament and complain. We can ask for forgiveness and give thanks. And when our nights are long and lonely, we can talk to God then too.

Journaling is extremely therapeutic and often recommended by mental health professionals. For me, I’m able to process what I am experiencing by writing out what I’m dealing with, what I’m thinking, and how I’m feeling. I also keep track of prayer requests and the answers to my prayers. God always answers our prayers. He may not answer them in the timing or in the way that we want, but He does always answer. I can’t say I understand how prayer works, but I do believe in the power of prayer, and looking back over the pages of my journal reminds me of this. I also love that journaling helps me see how present Jesus is in the midst of some of life’s most confusing and trying moments and how my emotion at the time, though legitimate, did not dictate the outcome.

In Mark 9, Jesus encountered a boy possessed by a demon. Jesus was able to do what His disciples could not: rid the boy of the demon. e disciples asked Jesus why they were unable to drive the demon out. In verse 29, Jesus responded in this way: “This kind can come out only by prayer.” As a result of prayer, Jesus was able to do what seemed to be impossible.

I encourage you to pray also, specifically about those hurtful memories from your past that haunt you. Kind of like demons, it may seem that the haunting experiences from a tough past will never go away. You may be questioning how you can ever “get over” your past. The fact is that there is nothing we can do to change the past. Yet, there is a lot we can do about the way we react to the reminders of the past while living fully in the present and leaning into the future.

Like King David, who experienced a war-torn life and is believed to have suffered from PTSD, you can cry out the words of the psalms he wrote and, undoubtedly, prayed over and over. David often began his prayers with anger and lashing out and asking why, but ended them by praising the Lord. “It is crucial for us to remember that although the Psalms begin with our internal world,” advised authors Dan Allender and Tremper Longman in their book The Cry of the Sould: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions about God, “they don’t allow us to dwell there, fixated on our problems and dark emotions ... the Psalter is a book of worship, driving us to God by insisting that we look to Him in the midst of our pain.” We can choose sanity, and prayer is integral to that choice.