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Why You Should Pray Even if You Don’t Believe in God

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“Alright!” Said the scrawny-looking teenager. “I’ll make a deal with you.”

He threw me a basketball.

“If you can go back and shoot a hoop from halfway, then I’ll come to church.”

Once upon a time, I was a church youth worker. And part of my job, of course, was to convince young people to join the church’s youth group. So, with great evangelistic fervor, I threw myself into the task, inviting kids from all over the neighborhood, including the young man standing in front of me right now.

It wasn’t the first time I’d invited him to church. But up until now, he’d always given me a flat “No!” But this time, I saw an opening. All I had to do was shoot a hoop from halfway.

Don’t let my body deceive you. I am not an athlete. In fact, sometimes, I have trouble walking and chewing gum at the same time. So, I knew that to pull off a half-court shot would require some kind of divine intervention.

As I took the lonely walk to the halfway line, I did what any good evangelical Christian would do in my situation. I prayed. “Lord, if you want this young man to come to church, you’re gonna have to do a miracle.”

I took a deep breath.

And, with a very un-basketball-like one-arm-side-arm action, I hurled the ball towards the backboard. And for a moment, it was as if time stood still. The ball sailed through the air and then as if touched by the divine hand of God himself…

“Swish!”

Nothing but net.

The young man looked at me, stunned.

“See you at church,” I said as if this kind of thing happened all the time. Then for good measure, I added, “I guess God wants you there.”

Slam dunk for Jesus!

Why do people pray?

As God is my witness, this is a true story. I laugh at it now, but at the time, I was convinced that God really had provided a miracle. These days, I think maybe it could have been God, or perhaps it was just luck. I’m not sure.

You might be skeptical about the effectiveness of prayer, and I am, too, if I am honest. I have wrestled with the question, “Why would God grant me a half-court shot but not answer the prayer of the person who wants to be healed from cancer?”

There are no easy answers. I don’t pretend to know how prayer works or if it works. But I do know something. There is a body of research that tells us that prayer has many emotional, physical, and spiritual benefits. What’s even more remarkable is that you can still experience the benefits of prayer even if you don’t believe in God.

Now that’s a miracle.

Before you call me a religious nutcase, let’s just normalize the act of praying. You might not admit it around the lunch table in your workplaces, but if you are a praying person, you’re actually in the majority. A recent survey by Pew Research Center found that over half of adults in the USA pray on a daily basis compared to 23% who never pray at all.

And, in case you think prayer was a dying art, the emergence of COVID-19 has actually caused an uptick in prayer. Since the start of the pandemic, Google searches for prayer have skyrocketed, according to Jeanet Sinding Bentzen, an economist at the University of Copenhagen, reaching the highest levels ever recorded. Another more recent Pew Research Center survey found that more than half of Americans had prayed to end the spread of COVID-19.

Like it or not, in times of crisis, human beings tend to turn to religion for comfort and explanation. “There may still be some atheists in foxholes,” says Kenneth Pargament, a professor emeritus in the department of psychology at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, who studies how people use religion to cope with significant life stressors and trauma. “But the general trend is for the religious impulse to quicken in a time of crisis.”

What research tells us about prayer

Scientists have no way to measure the existence of a higher power, of course, but prayer, it turns out, has plenty of scientifically verifiable mental health benefits for those who are open to it, according to David H. Rosmarin, assistant professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School and director of the Spirituality and Mental Health Program.

Dr. Rosmarin says that the research that has been done on prayer shows it may have similar benefits to meditation: It can calm your nervous system, for example, shutting down your fight or flight response. It can also make you less reactive to negative emotions and less angry.

So, why not just meditate? Why pray?

Well, while meditation is helpful, prayer is even better. According to a 2005 study in the Journal of Behavioral Medicine comparing secular and spiritual forms of meditation found spiritual meditation to be more calming. In secular meditation, you focus on something such as your breath or a nonspiritual word. In spiritual meditation, you focus on a spiritual word or text. Participants were divided into groups, with some being taught how to meditate using words of self-affirmation (“I am love”) and others taught how to meditate with words that described a higher power (“God is love”). They then meditated for 20 minutes a day for four weeks.

Researchers found that the group that practiced spiritual meditation showed more significant decreases in anxiety and stress and a more positive mood. They also tolerated pain almost twice as long when asked to put their hand in an ice water bath. So, prayer can actually lift your pain threshold.

Who would have thought?

But there are other benefits to prayer. Research tells us that people who pray report feeling a sense of emotional support. “Imagine carrying a backpack hour after hour. It will start to feel impossibly heavy. But if you can hand it off to someone else to hold for a while, it will feel lighter when you pick it up again. “This is what prayer can do,” says Amy Wachholtz, associate professor and clinical health psychology director at the University of Colorado Denver and lead researcher on the meditation study. “It lets you put down your burden mentally for a bit and rest.”

But wait! There’s more! Prayer can also foster a sense of connection — with your family, your community, your environment, and with other people, including “the generations of people who have prayed before you,” says Kevin Ladd, a psychologist and director of the Social Psychology of Religion Lab at Indiana University South Bend.

And if that weren’t enough, prayer can even help your marriage, according to several studies at Florida State University, in Tallahassee. Researchers there have found that when people pray for the well-being of their spouse, when they feel a negative emotion in the marriage, both partners — the one doing the praying and the one being prayed for — report greater relationship satisfaction. “Prayer gives couples a chance to calm down,” says Frank Fincham, an eminent scholar in the College of Human Sciences at Florida State University who conducted the studies. “And it reinforces the idea that you are on the same team.” Yes, the couple that prays together stays together.

Not all prayer is equal

People pray for many reasons, including for guidance, thanksgiving, solace, or protection. And, of course, people pray that God will grant their wishes — like half-court basketball shots. But not all prayer is created equal, experts say. A 2004 study on religious coping methods in the Journal of Health Psychology found that people who approach God as a partner, or collaborator, in their life had better mental- and physical health outcomes, and people who are angry at God — who feel punished or abandoned — or who relinquish responsibility and defer to God for solutions had worse outcomes. It’s similar to the way a loving relationship with a partner brings out the best in you, says Dr. Pargament, the lead researcher on the study. It makes sense to me!

Prayer changes you

When I was a kid, I used to pray for stuff.

Like a new bike.

I treated God like some transcendental ‘Santa Claus’ in the sky — he could give me stuff if I was a good boy. What troubles me is that I still see adults praying the same way. They plead with Daddy until Daddy relents and gives them what they want. They use prayer to manipulate God to act in a certain way — as if that were even possible. It’s a transactional approach — the practice of children.

Towards the end of his life, C.S. Lewis married an American writer named Joy Davidman. Sadly, Joy Davidman contracted terminal bone cancer and passed away just four years later. At one point during this unfolding tragedy, a friend of C.S. Lewis said to him: “I know how hard you’ve been praying. Hopefully, God is answering your prayers.”

Lewis replied, “That’s not why I pray. I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. Prayer doesn’t change God; it changes me.”

Exactly.

Research supports the idea that the purpose of prayer is less about changing God’s mind and more about changing us. Somehow prayer — the kind of prayer where one simply seeks connection with the divine — soothes our very souls. Feelings of peace and well-being seem to follow. Is that how God answers our prayers? Is the inner peace that accompanies prayer God reaching out to us as deep cries out to deep? Or is it simply the by-product of stillness, reflection, and meditation?

Either way, prayer works.

This post was previously published on Backyard Church.

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The post Why You Should Pray Even if You Don’t Believe in God appeared first on The Good Men Project.


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