Today’s post is a little motivation from one of my favorite authors, C.S. Lewis. Most people know of The Chronicles of Narnia and The Screwtape Letters, but Lewis wrote more than 30 other brilliant but lesser-known books and essays.

Below is an excerpt from “The Efficacy of Prayer,” taken from Lewis’s The World’s Last Night and Other Essays:

Some years ago, I got up one morning intending to have my hair cut in preparation for a visit to London, and the first letter I opened made it clear that I need not go to London. So I decided to put my haircut off too. But then there began the most unaccountable little nagging in my mind, almost like a voice saying, “Get it cut all the same. Go and get it cut…” Now my barber at the time was a fellow Christian and a man of many troubles…the moment I opened his shop door he said, “Oh, I was praying you might come today.” And in fact, if I had come a day or so later, I should have been no use to him.

It awed me; it awes me still. But of course, one cannot rigorously prove a casual connection between the barber’s prayers and my visit. It might be telepathy. It might be accident. I have stood by the bedside of a woman whose thighbone was eaten through with cancer…It took three people to move her in bed… A good man laid his hands on her and prayed. A year later, the patient was walking and the man who took the last x-ray photos was saying, “These bones are as solid as a rock. It’s miraculous”…

The question then arises, “What sort of evidence would prove the efficacy of prayer?” The thing we pray for may happen, but how can you ever know it was not going to happen anyway?…

The very question “Does prayer work?” puts us in the wrong frame of mind from the outset. “Work” as if it were magic, or a machine – something that functions automatically…And no doubt is it raises a theoretical problem. Can we believe that God ever really modifies His action in response to the suggestions of men? For infinite wisdom does not need telling what is best, and infinite goodness needs no urging to do it…

Instead, he allows soils and weather and animals and the muscles, minds and wills of men to co-operate in the execution of his will…For He seems to do nothing of himself which He can possibly delegate to his creatures. He commands us to do slowly and blunderingly what He could do perfectly and in the twinkling of an eye…

Meanwhile, little people like you and me, if our prayers are sometimes granted, beyond all hope and probability, had better not draw hasty conclusions to our own advantage. If we were stronger, we might be less tenderly treated. If we were braver, we might be sent, with far less help, to defend far more desperate posts in the great battle.

 

*Taken from The World’s Last Night and Other Essays, by C.S. Lewis. Mariner Books (November 4, 2002).