One day Jesus told his disciples a story to show that they should always pray and never give up. “There was a judge in a certain city,” he said, “who neither feared God nor cared about people. A widow of that city came to him repeatedly, saying, ‘Give me justice in this dispute with my enemy.’ The judge ignored her for a while, but finally he said to himself, ‘I don’t fear God or care about people, but this woman is driving me crazy. I’m going to see that she gets justice, because she is wearing me out with her constant requests!’” Then the Lord said, “Learn a lesson from this unjust judge. Even he rendered a just decision in the end. So don’t you think God will surely give justice to his chosen people who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? I tell you, he will grant justice to them quickly! But when the Son of Man returns, how many will he find on the earth who have faith?”
Luke 18:1-8

Dear God, I had lunch recently with a friend and we were talking about how you are going to do what you are going to do, and our lives aren’t about us, but they are about you and how you might use us for your purposes. That’s all really neat and tidy for me. Pretty simple. Then I come across a parable like this from Jesus. The only line, “I don’t pray because it changes God. I pray because it changes me,” doesn’t seem to fit with this one. Can you really be changed?

I guess it goes back to verse 1. Why did Jesus tell this parable? Not all parables start with the moral of the story, but this one does. The point of the parable is to tell me that I should always pray and never give up. Always pray and never give up. My wife and I pray together every day. Sometimes it feels hopeless. In fact, yesterday, I told her that I felt hopeless with something of the things we pray about often. Just hopeless. As I thought about that this morning, I started to try to think of a parable where desperate prayer made an impact. This is the one that came to mind.

Father, you know what I prayed about this morning. You know what I prayed about yesterday, the day before that, and the day before that. For some of these things I’ve been praying for 10 years. And I confess to you that sometimes I lose faith. Sometimes I feel hopeless. But then you remind me through stories like this that I just need to keep praying and never give up. You also remind me through the stories of your people that most of the time the person doing the praying never lives to see the day their prayers are answered. Who am I to expect any different. So I have my concerns today, and I lift them to you. Does it change you? I don’t think it does as much as I would like it to, but I do think you are working in ways that I cannot see, and it is just my job to believe in you, trust in you, and have the faith in the things I hope for but cannot see. Help me to live out those words I just wrote.

I pray this through Jesus’s life, death and resurrection,

Amen