Help!

 As we walk through Anne Lamott’s Help, Thanks, Wow, we come today to the first of her three prayers—“Help!”

Help is the prayer we pray when we need an intervention. Lamott says, “There’s freedom in hitting bottom, in seeing that you won’t be able to save or rescue your daughter, her spouse, his parents, or your career, relief in admitting you’ve reached the place of great unknowing.” This letting go of control, and admitting that I can’t take care of my problems, and the problems of everyone else along the way, is harder for me than it should be. I want to be self-sufficient, and yet I know I am not. So, as we turn away from pretending that we have it all together, we can move toward this first prayer, “Help. Help us walk through this. Help us come through.”

Lamott tells several stories throughout this chapter about people who have prayed to God, or even to whatever power they believed in. Sometimes, she says, we see the miracles, and sometimes they happen, but we don’t recognize them. Sometimes prayers are answered in the way that we want them to be, and sometimes they are answered, but with a different outcome than we wanted. We can believe, though, that God always hears and always answers, even if it is difficult for us to see.

Lamott says, “ I have seen many people survive unsurvivable losses, and seen them experience happiness again. How is this possible? Love flowed to them from their closest people, and from their community, surrounded them, sat with them, held them, fed them, swept their floors. Time passed. In most cases, their pain evolved slowly in to help for others.”

And that’s one of the coolest things about the help prayer—often times, when we pray it for others, God ends up using the very ones who prayed it to be the answer. While it is not our job to stop anyone from dying, nor can we typically heal sickness or prevent a job loss or divorce or totally solve someone else’s financial troubles, we can pray. And we can act. And we can listen. We can sit with our friends/family, and we can make sure they have what they need to get through a day. We can provide coffee, or a shoulder to cry on, or the support that comes from physically sitting beside someone.

And prayer DOES change things. It changes the way we see our circumstances, and it changes our hearts.  James 5:16 says, “ Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.” The Bible is reminding us here that we don’t walk this journey alone—that we are to intervene and ask for help, and that God listens and acts as we ask for His help.

My encouragement to you today is to ask for that help. We don’t even have to wait until we feel like we’ve done everything else we can do, and that prayer, “help,” is our only option. Prayer should be where we start. Begin by praying “help,”  and then wait and see how God may want to use you to be the answer that someone else needs.

Discussion Questions:

- How have you seen God answer this prayer for you?

- How can you be this answer for someone else?