Anchor Points and Empty Prayers
Rock climbing is my favorite solo sport. In climbing, anchors aren’t just a piece of gear, it’s what keeps me from falling when everything else gives way. It’s what I trust when my strength runs out. And prayer has become that for me. Not a place to prove myself, but a place to be secured. A quiet, steady point I can return to, no matter how exposed or exhausted I feel.
However, prayer hasn’t always felt helpful. There are times when it’s silent. Empty. Like throwing words into a void.
In earlier seasons of my life, prayer was something I approached with structure, expectations, and perhaps even pressure. Pressure to be clear, effective, or persuasive. There was an undertone of performance: if I could pray “right,” maybe God would move more.
The Turning Point
But life’s rugged terrain (divorce, disappointment, disorientation, disapproval, insert your own adjective) stripped away those assumptions. I came face-to-face with the limits of my own control. It’s in that space I learned something deeper, and it changed the way I pray:
Faith isn’t anchored in my reach toward God, but on God’s relentless reach toward me.
This shift anchored me in something larger, older, and far more faithful than myself. Moving from transaction to communion prayer becomes less about striving and more about responding. Less performance, more presence. It shifted from trying to say the right thing to allowing space for God to show me the right thing.
The Gift of Stillness
Sometimes I speak my prayers aloud. Sometimes I write them down.
And over time, something holy emerged:
Not clarity at first, but quietness.
Not answers, but attention.
And eventually… transformation.
In fact, journaling my prayers has become one of the most important habits I’ve formed. There’s something sacred about writing what I can’t say out loud. Years later, I look back through those old journal pages and I see it: Grace I didn’t recognize. Prayers I didn’t know were being answered. Faith quietly unfolding in the dark, before the light ever broke through.
Prayer changes my posture. It softens my heart. And maybe most importantly, it gives me something to return to when my faith feels thin.
Because even when my faith feels thin, God’s love is relentless.
That’s the beauty of prayer: not that I always find answers…
But that I am always being found.
Where I began with prayer as strategy, I now live prayer as surrender.
A Church Built on Surrender
Prayer was the first act of the early Church—before evangelism, before healing, before preaching. The apostles didn’t begin with strategy. They began with surrender.
And it changed everything.
“These with one mind were continually devoting themselves to prayer.”
— Acts 1:14
The most powerful and transformative Church in history was built not just on sermons, but on prayer. It wasn’t programs or platforms that moved the needle. It was presence. A group of people so devoted to communion with God that their unity broke socioeconomic barriers, bridged racial and gender divides, and turned generosity into a force of healing.
I no longer believe prayer is where I “get” things from God.
I believe it’s where I return to who I am in Him.
Prayer reminds me that transformation doesn’t start with the world changing.
It starts with me changing.
Prayer doesn’t fix you. It does, however, remind you who you are and what you are becoming. It invites you to slow down, reflect, and pay attention to the terrain around you, and the strength within you.
That’s the only way we become an extension of His ministry to mankind.
And that’s the only way we become the change the world actually needs
Here’s how it works:
Prayer produces clarity.
Clarity produces vision.
Vision produces purpose.
Purpose produces a plan.
A plan produces effectiveness.
But the key is this: it doesn’t begin with effort. It begins with surrender.
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