Wednesday - Can you hear me now?

Does it feel like sometimes your prayers are just bouncing off the walls?  Do you sometimes feel like the man in the cell phone commercial asking God, “Can you hear me now”?  Do you feel like you pray, and pray, and pray and it sometimes seems like your prayers are never answered?  Take comfort,  Jesus himself can identify with these feelings of abandonment as seen in Matthew 27:46 when he cries out To God, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  
 
It might be tempting to throw in the towel but take these words of Scripture to heart in your moments of desiring to give up on prayer.  The writer of the Gospel of Matthew records Jesus saying, “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you.”  What is fascinating about this verse is that in the Greek the verbs are in the present active tense.  So a more literal translation of this verse might read, “Keep on asking….keep on searching…keep on knocking”.  It’s like the writer of Matthew knows how difficult praying can be for us when we are tempted to give up and say “it isn’t working”. 
 
When I feel abandoned or the desire to give up in prayer I think of the Jon Bon Jovi song Living on a Prayer (no joke, I really do!).  Sometimes I will blast the chorus of the song in my iPod as a reminder to keep on praying.  Bon Jovi sings:
 

woooah
We're half way there
Livin' on a prayer
Take my hand and we'll make it - I swear
Livin' on a prayer

I imagine God reaching out and taking my hand to give me the strength to keep praying.  Sometimes it feels like that, that we are just livin’ on a prayer and I don’t think we are alone in that feeling.