The Slow, Steady Work of Prayer

Blog by Alan Fadling

Have you ever felt discouraged by the ups and downs of your prayer life? One week it may feel alive and real, and the next it feels dry and distant. We might assume something’s wrong, that we’ve somehow lost ground. But what if that ebb and flow is part of how prayer matures?

Like the ocean tide, prayer rises and recedes, yet over time the waterline of grace keeps moving higher. God is at work in both the sweetness and the dryness.

Some of the best companions in my spiritual journey have been writers who lived long before me. Their words slow me down and remind me what really matters. One of those voices is Leonard Boase. He wrote a small book called The Prayer of Faith back in 1962—the year after I was born. His reflections on how prayer grows have been a quiet encouragement to me.

Have you ever felt like your prayer life moves two steps forward and one step back? Maybe you’ve had a stretch when prayer felt close and easy. Then suddenly things go quiet. You can’t find words. You wonder what happened to the closeness you once felt.

If that sounds familiar, take heart. What feels like a loss may actually be growth.

One image from Boase’s book has stayed with me. He writes:

“More characteristically of prayer than of any other development, it is the rule that progress is like the progress of an incoming tide, that each forward movement is followed by a backward one… if on the whole the tide rises along the shore, the predominant impression is one of constant withdrawal after each advance, and the total advance is imperceptible or unperceived.” [1]

He’s saying that spiritual growth—especially growth in prayer—isn’t linear. It doesn’t move in clean, measurable increments. It’s not a staircase where each step is higher than the last. It’s more like the ocean tide in motion. A wave breaks, then recedes. Sometimes the pull backward feels stronger than the push forward. But if you step back and look over time, the water is still rising.

The trouble is that we often expect progress with God to look like progress in other parts of life—steady, measurable, controllable. We think, “If I work harder, read more, pray longer, I’ll keep climbing upward.” But grace doesn’t work that way. The spiritual life is less about our management and more about God’s movement. It’s not something we produce. It’s something we receive.

That truth reminds me of a story a mentor of mine, Wayne Anderson, loved to tell about his own mentor, Lee Whiston, a pastor and theologian from Massachusetts. Whiston once said:

“One day, at forty, I heard six people tell their stories of how God had changed their lives—honest and transparent. They radiated an inner presence. Soon after this, I was sitting on one of Maine’s promontories, watching the tide come in.

‘Lee,’ I seemed to hear, ‘you’re taking a pail, filling it with water at the point, running to the head of the bay, emptying it, running back to fill the pail again… endlessly running back and forth. Why don’t you let Me bring in the tide?’

Suddenly I saw the utter foolishness of my activity. I saw the difference between doing His work and doing His will. I began to open up my life and become more vulnerable. I was amazed at His grace. God, You really love me and I haven’t done anything to deserve it. Growing in grace.

There were still relapses, but God was forgiving. I lived more and more of my life from this new center.”

It’s a beautiful story. And it captures something essential about prayer and spiritual maturity. We hurry about with our buckets, trying to fill the bay ourselves. But the tide doesn’t need our help. Prayer isn’t something we make happen; it’s something we let happen.

Like Lee, we can learn to cooperate with the way God brings the tide in—slowly, steadily, sometimes imperceptibly, but always faithfully.

For Reflection:

• Where have you mistaken a backward-feeling moment in prayer for failure rather than growth?
• In what places of your spiritual life are you still carrying buckets, trying to make things happen for God?
• How might you cooperate more freely with the slow, steady tide of God’s work in you this week?

 [1] Leonard Boase. The Prayer of Faith. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1950, p. 30.