Stop Praying It Easy

Can I say something that might sting just a little?

Some of the most well-intentioned prayers we pray for the people we love are actually the ones holding them back.

Now stay with me — because this comes from a place of complete understanding. When you love someone the way you love your children, your grandchildren, your spouse — the absolute last thing you want is to watch them hurt. It breaks something in you to see them struggling. So naturally, we pray the prayers that feel the most loving. Lord, protect them from hard seasons. Keep the difficult moments away. Smooth out the road ahead of them.

And those prayers make perfect sense when you love someone that deeply. Of course they do.

But here’s the thing — a life without hard moments is also a life without ever seeing the goodness of God show up in the middle of them. The faith that gets built in the valley is a different kind of faith than the faith that only ever lives on the mountaintop. If we pray every hard thing away from the people we love, we may actually be praying away the very moments that would have changed them. Grown them. Drawn them closer to God than anything else ever could have.

That is not a small thing to consider.

Let me give you a real example. Your teenager decides to speed, gets pulled over, and walks away with a ticket. Now that ticket has consequences — a fine, maybe a late bill, maybe a very inconvenient few months of adjusting their budget. And every part of you wants to fix it. Maybe even pray it away. But what would that actually teach them? What gets built in them if every consequence gets smoothed over before they ever have to feel it?

Sometimes the most life-giving thing we can do is let the people we love walk through what they walked into — and pray that God meets them right there in the middle of it.

That is a very different kind of prayer. And honestly, it’s a harder one to pray. Because it requires us to trust God with the people we would do absolutely anything for. It requires releasing our grip on the outcome and believing that He loves them even more than we do — which, if you have ever loved someone with your whole heart, feels nearly impossible to imagine.

But it’s true. And it changes everything about how we pray.

This doesn’t mean you stop praying for their safety, their health, their growth. Of course you pray those things. Of course you bring them before God every single day. But there’s a difference between praying for their protection and praying for their preservation from every hard thing. One trusts God with them. The other tries to do God’s job for Him.

Pray that they would have wisdom when they face hard decisions. (Philippians 1:9-10, CSB) Pray that when they make the wrong one anyway — and they will, because they are human and so are we — that God would meet them in the consequences with grace and truth. Pray that the difficult seasons would draw them toward Him instead of away. Pray that they would see His goodness not just on the easy days but especially on the hard ones.

Those are the life-giving prayers. The ones that don’t just ask for happiness but actually ask for depth, resilience, and a faith that can hold up under pressure.

The people you love deserve those prayers far more than they deserve a struggle-free life.

Trust Him with them. Even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard.

helping you with the pause ~Cyndi Kay🧡