Posted May 07, 2026
The 2026 National Day of Prayer is today. Millions of Christians around the US will pray for our nation personally and in gatherings with other believers. We do so in the firm belief, as the saying goes, that God is always “just a prayer away.”
To a skeptic, this must seem an unprovable assertion, a self-fulfilling prophecy akin to a horoscope. If yours predicts that you’ll have a good day, your grateful mindset in response helps make it so. If you believe in God, your faith helps you “experience” him in prayer in ways that validate your belief.
Such skeptics are right: we cannot prove to them, or even to ourselves, that time spent in prayer today or any other day is warranted, that the God to whom we pray is the God we believe him to be.
Here’s why that’s such a good thing.
There are at least six ways Christians seek to experience God. Some focus on a contemplative relationship with him, others on holiness and personal virtue, still others on the power of his Spirit, the priority of social justice and compassion, the call to preach the “good news,” and the privilege of experiencing him in his creation. Some of us attempt to walk each of these avenues in our desire to “know Christ and make him known.”
However, I have personally known Muslims who are just as devoted to the “five pillars” of Islam, Buddhists who are just as committed to the “Noble Eightfold Path” of Buddhism, and Jews who are just as ardent in keeping the 613 laws of their religion.
How are we so certain that we are right and they are wrong?
I will add in full transparency that there are days when my quest to experience the God to whom I pray seems unfulfilled. I have never cried with Jesus from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46, quoting Psalm 22:1), but I have prayed fervent prayers that were unanswered so far as I know. I have resonated with David’s plea, “O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer, and by night, but I find no rest” (Psalm 22:2).
Perhaps, like me, you’ve experienced what St. John of the Cross (1542–91) called the “dark night of the soul.” Like Elijah, we can abandon hope (1 Kings 19:4); like Moses, we can feel that our “burden is too heavy for me” (Numbers 11:14); like Jeremiah, it can seem that “though I call and cry for help, he shuts out my prayer” (Lamentations 3:8). Paul similarly wrote of a time when he was “so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself” (2 Corinthians 1:8).
But then he made an assertion that frames my point today: “That was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead” (v. 9).
On one hand, the fact that we cannot prove the existence of the God we trust is only logical. Because “God is spirit” (John 4:24), we cannot verify him through empirical, material means. Because “our God is in the heavens” (Psalm 115:3), we cannot point to him on Earth.
And relationships are verified not through test tubes and mathematical equations but through experience. As C. S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity: “A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works: indeed, he certainly would not know how it works until he has accepted it.”
On the other hand, the lack of certainty that is a necessary component of our faith can compel us forward in faith. Our trust in our Father’s omniscience positions us to receive and follow his leadership. Our belief in his omnipotence encourages us to seek and experience his provision.
And our inability to prove our faith through reason invites us to focus less on what we “too much discuss” and “too much explain,” as T. S. Eliot noted, and more on the God who should be the object of our worship and service. Søren Kierkegaard would agree, claiming: “The highest of all is not to understand the highest but to act upon it.”
How do we do this?
Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote, “Nothing worthy proving can be proven, nor yet disproven.” In The Myth of Certainty: The Reflective Christian and the Risk of Commitment, Daniel Taylor similarly reminds us that “the most important and desirable things in the human experience have no physical existence.”
We can point, for example, to the “faith, hope, and love” that are the hallmarks of a personal relationship with the living Lord Jesus (1 Corinthians 13:13). The more we experience them, the less we feel the need to understand them or to prove them to others. In Tennyson’s words, we “cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt” and “cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith.”
Such a journey will have bright days and dark, joyful hopes and discouraging doubts, because that is the way of life as fallen people on a fallen planet. Jacques Ellul was right: “The movement of faith is unceasing, because no explanation it offers is ever finished.” But we can take our next step with Jesus today, knowing that “the Lᴏʀᴅ will be your everlasting light” (Isaiah 60:19) because all of God there is, is in this moment (cf. Psalm 63:1–8).
Br. Jamie Nelson of the Society of St. John the Evangelist in Boston notes, “We crave certainty because it provides a mental container that makes us feel safer, soothes our anxiety, and protects the illusion of control.” But he suggests that a better approach is to “gently sit with the discomfort of uncertainty” and “practice welcoming God into those moments, for you are not alone.”
He therefore encourages us to “pray to God for the peace and courage to help you to release the desire for answers carved in stone, and instead to follow an invitation to deeper relationship.”
Will you pray for such “peace and courage” today?
“We must know where to doubt, where to feel certain, where to submit. He who does not do so, understands not the force of reason.” —Blaise Pascal
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