In-Depth Resource Review—Talking in the Dark

Talking In the Dark

by Jeff Dunn-Rankin

Imagine you tell someone you love them, and what follows is a long silence.

Awkward. Maybe even heartbreaking.

Truth be told, that’s how a lot of people feel about prayer. Talking In the Dark by Steve Harper was written for them—for us.

Harper digs into the frustrations that so many people have with prayer— the silence, the disappointments, the weariness. He acknowledges that those roadblocks are natural and real. At the same time, he insists that a consistent, deep prayer life is a non-negotiable part of a healthy Christian life.

“Prayer does not come easily for me,” he writes. “But I cannot stop praying. Every time I try, I feel as if my soul is suffocating. I am convinced that outside of salvation itself, prayer is God’s greatest gift to us.”

Harper acknowledges that lots of our prayer time is lovely and edifying. He calls that “praying in the light.” But this book deals with those times when we are “praying in the dark.” He says part of our frustration with prayer stems from the very nature of who God is—unseen and beyond our understanding. “Talking to an invisible God keeps us dwelling in the land of mystery. We do not know how to live well in that land.”

Part of the problem, though, is clearly on our shoulders. Because we cannot completely understand God, we aren’t really comfortable trusting God. The logical human in all of us says, If I can’t figure out how prayer works, I’m not sure I want to invest a lot of time in it. (Which is odd because we count on airplanes, iPods, and microwaves all the time.)

Finally, the church is also part of the problem. Most churches act as though praying is like breathing—a natural function of being human. Harper suggests that we think of prayer more like talking: Yes it’s natural, but we still need to coach and cultivate someone’s language skills. Instead, most of us toss our youth a few sketchy ideas about what prayer is, then leave them to create their own theology—one that misses the nuance and the mystery of faith.

We often oversell prayer, Harper says, because our public prayers suggest that if we put enough quarters in the vending machine, and we get our friends to drop in their quarters, too, we will eventually get what we want. And we undersell prayer, too, when we don’t demonstrate the full palette of prayers that the Bible offers. When a teenager says her grandma has cancer, we typically pray to God the conqueror, Harper writes, but sometimes we need to pray to the God who offers perspective and the God who comforts us in the dark valleys.

The second half of Harper’s book offers rich stories that offer gentle guidance on how to pray in the dark, especially in times of crisis, and when you’re dry. Each chapter, though, is a variation on this theme: To pray in the dark, we will need a ruthless trust that God is there, even when we don’t see any evidence. It will require us to believe the consistent promises of scripture, like the one that Paul sent the Romans: 

“For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39).

We will need to acknowledge the ambiguity of faith and be prepared to respond in the ways suggested by Frederick Buechner: “You do not solve the mystery; you live the mystery.”