Perhaps the hardest thing about prayer is that it just feels so powerless. In contrast, when I can do something practical for you – rake your yard, buy your lunch, work for fair housing, solve your problems – I feel powerful; I feel in control. By comparison, prayer feels powerless, quiet, small and hidden. That’s the real “folly” of prayer. It’s so wrapped up with humans and humans are notoriously slow and vulnerable. A colony of bacteria can kill us. A lustful desire can drive us insane with addiction. And then we’re also stubborn, spiritually inattentive and even callous towards God and others. How can God possibly use our prayers to do anything for good in this world? It just seems so powerless.
I’m starting to notice how God works through our powerlessness and our weakness (not to mention our pain and our failures) to accomplish his purposes for the world. I think of my friend Theresa who experienced a dark, dark night of the soul. After finding the man of her dreams, she dropped into the abyss of a deep depression. Everything went dark in her mind and her body. Three years ago I would have had plenty of answers and solutions for her. I would have been so clever and powerful. But now all I could do was to sit with her in her pain. We prayed. I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t have any answers, so I said, “Theresa, I have no idea what to say so could we just read Psalm 77.” Then I read Psalm 77, an agonizing psalm of lament, and I went home. I left feeling utterly powerless.
The next week I discovered that she had been clinging to Psalm 77 every day. Apparently, when we read Psalm 77 in utter powerlessness, God showed up in her life with power.
At times the best, most powerful and most useful way to love you is 
to get to the end of myself. I admit that I can’t fix you or change you. But I can be with you and we can go together to the Father. So we come as frail and hard-hearted instruments, but we also come as sons and daughters who know their Father’s heart. And on your behalf I do something so useless that leads to such power: I pray for you.
(Adapted from The Folly of Prayer)
Rummaging 