On Independence Day, the nation came together in a way no one wanted: We became united in grief. And as news of the devastating flooding in Texas spread, so did the calls for prayer.
As teams from his relief organization, Samaritan’s Purse, headed to Texas to provide assistance, Franklin Graham, president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, took to X to request prayer, not only for the families affected, but also for the first responders and rescue teams.
Former President Barack Obama posted on social media that he and his wife were praying for the people of Texas, as did President Donald Trump. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott declared Sunday to be a day of prayer. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, who less than two weeks ago declared June 29 a day of prayer and fasting for rain to ease drought conditions in Utah, also called for prayer for Texas.
While the phrase “thoughts and prayers” is used so much that it’s become a cliche, we instinctively turn to prayer at times like this.
How many Americans pray?
Despite our differences and our much-written-about decline in religiosity, Americans remain a people who pray. More than two-thirds of us pray at least a few times a month, and 44% of us pray daily, according to Pew Research. (Daily prayer rises to 73% among Latter-day Saints.)
It’s natural that we turn to God in prayer in a time of crisis, but even people of unshakeable faith know that you can pray until your knees ache and still not see the outcome you were hoping for.
In those times, the skeptics pounce, as did the person who angrily asked Franklin Graham on X, “Where’s your god now?”
For people of faith, that’s an easy question to answer. God is with the grieving, grieving with them.
Christians worship a Savior who wept for the dead, who prayed that he himself not undergo the suffering of the cross, and who even questioned why God had forsaken him as he was dying.
In an email, Franklin Graham said it was an understandable question.
“Whenever tragedy sends its arrows of pain and loss into our lives, our response is sometimes to question where God is and whether He cares,” Graham said.
“The Bible says that God’s Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, came as a Man of sorrows who was acquainted with grief. So He isn’t distant and He isn’t uncaring. In fact, God is right where He has always been. He is right here with us — in the middle of our deepest suffering. He promises us in His Word that He will ‘never leave us or forsake us’ and that He is ‘near to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.’"
The harder question, perhaps, is why we continue to pray, given that our prayers don’t always result in the outcome that we want.
C.S. Lewis believed that prayer is transformational — not that it changes what God does, but that it changes the people who pray. As Jessica Curtis said on X, we have “hearts turned upward” when we pray, even amid great suffering.
In this way, prayer is not the least we can do, but the most we can do, even when prayers seem to go unanswered.
As the heartbreaking stories from Texas pile up, I am reminded of the woman who lost her parents and her 7-year-old son in the Asheville, North Carolina, flood last year.
Prayers didn’t prevent Megan Drye’s loss or diminish her pain, but she told Fox News that she had been sustained by the people who were praying for her and by her unwavering belief that Jesus had heard her son’s cries and met him in his final moment.
Prayer works, the Texas governor said. It just doesn’t always work the way we want it to.
President Jeffrey R. Holland of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints endured months of “loss, illness and distress” after his wife, Patricia, died in July of 2023 and he was hospitalized with a serious illness. “I will be eternally grateful for the supplication of thousands of people who ... repeatedly sought heaven’s intervention in my behalf,” he said.
He also noted that “roughly the same time so many were praying for the restoration of my health, an equal number — including me — were praying for the restoration of my wife’s health."
Those prayers were still heard and answered — even if they were not answered the way he asked, he said. “It is for reasons known only to God why prayers are answered differently than we hope — but I promise you they are heard and they are answered according to His unfailing love and cosmic timetable."
What did C.S. Lewis say about prayer?
C.S. Lewis wrestled with this problem after his wife died of cancer just a few years after they married. In a letter he wrote to an American who had lost his only child in a car crash, Lewis wrote, “I too have lost what I most loved.” He had prayed for his wife’s healing and believed for a while that his prayers had been answered when her cancer went into remission, but then it returned.
Devin Brown, a professor of English at Asbury University in Wilmore, Kentucky, who has written several books on Lewis, said Lewis asked many of the same questions that people are asking today, and even wrote in “A Grief Observed” something similar to what the man asked Franklin Graham on X: “Meanwhile, where is God?”
“Go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that silence,” Lewis wrote near the beginning of his memoir about grief.
Brown said in an email, “Lewis did not lose his faith after his wife’s death, but neither did he get all his questions answered in the end. But it was in the way his questions about God’s goodness, his wife’s suffering, and his own pain were not answered that he came to a resolution.”
In the end, Lewis concluded: ‘When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of ‘No answer.’ It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, ‘Peace, child, you don’t understand.’”
In his email, Graham noted that suffering has been part of the human condition going back to Eden and that Christians believe Christ’s sacrifice will eventually end it.
“We know from the Bible that God loves us and cares for us, but when the first man and woman sinned against God, suffering and death entered the world. All of us since then have lived in a world that’s broken and filled with tragedies,” Graham said.
He added: “One day — and I believe it will be soon — Christ will return and usher in His age of peace and righteousness. He will wipe away every tear and there will be no more death. Until then, He promises to be with us in the middle of life’s storms."