"O God, I Need Your Help."

“O God, I Need Your Help.”

Sometimes the most meaningful and effective prayers are not the most eloquent or lengthy.  They spontaneously burst forth from our lips and hearts.  Simple, genuine words that communicate the desires of hearts and authenticity of personality find expression within continual and daily agony.  A simple prayer, “O God, I need Your help,” arose within me as I sat on a bench in Riverside Park on the Upper Side of Manhattan having stopped in the middle of a morning run.  It was late fall in 1991.  I was as depressed as I had ever been in my life.  Despite the chagrin, disagreement and lack of support of close family members and friends, I steadfastly remained in a hurtful and dying relationship.  After four and a half years of hard work, my painstaking and tireless efforts to adapt, adjust, accommodate and even acquiesce proved utterly fruitless. 

The combination of my intractable fear and glacially melting low self-esteem tempted me to remain in this debilitating and life-defeating relationship.  Those two imposters had tricked me into allowing unacceptable circumstances to become daily occurrences.  I tolerated verbal abuse and volatile and unpredictable situations.  Because I was so afraid of losing this relationship and fearing the impossibility of being in another one, I became a hostage to an unloving, disrespectful, symbiotic and demeaning bond.  Still, I lacked the internal courage to leave proactively.  Realizing my powerlessness and helplessness, I said aloud that simple but enduringly significant prayer.

Wholeheartedly, I suggest this prayer or your own personal and intimate version of it as the answer to millions of fears.  In its irrational, insidious, insane and implacable forms, fear deprives its prisoners and hostages of experiencing the lives they imagine.  Perhaps, you are afraid to go to your mailbox because of mounting bills and debt.  The ringing of a phone anywhere causes you to sweat as anxiety about talking with a collection agency nearly paralyzes you.  Conceivably, you compromised your moral and ethical principles in response to a threat of termination because you were too afraid to lose your income.  Do you work in a setting where your coworkers and bosses grossly undervalue you but you are too fearful of seeking another position?

It is far easier to surrender to fear and maintain a respectable psychosocial moratorium in which you work at a job that requires very little of you but pays well.  Serial monogamy is a convenient and painless answer to broken engagements and divorce.  Repeated sequential relationships do not extract an investment of your mind and heart.  Daily pathologies entrap many people within divergent types of addiction.  Resolving fear often requires divine help as human resources are inadequate.

I remained in the foregoing relationship for another four months.  Upon returning from an international trip, she came to the kitchen table where I was sitting and immediately said, “I think we should break up.”  I experienced a defining moment.  I paused.  Eternity ran through the next few minutes.  Fear swelled within me.  I nearly assumed my usual position in the relational dance.  I was the one to implore frighteningly the need to pray, seek the aid of Almighty God and persevere as I knew our relationship would work if we only tried harder and harder.  My pleas usually succeeded in abating the collapse of our relationship and bringing us back from the precipice of irreversible separation.  My pleadings also brought temporary relief from my pervasive and penetrating fears. 

In that eternal instant on that Thursday night and Friday morning in January 1992, I shocked myself when I heard the words, “You’re right.  We should break up and pursue other lives.”  Hardly grandiloquent, those powerful words saved my life.  Divine in origin and force, those simple words were the answer to my prayer in the park offered a few months previously.  Those words broke the shackles of my fears and liberated me to pursue the unique, wonderful and mysterious life which my Creator meant for me to enjoy.  As an unfailingly loving and faithfully sustaining God empowered me with those words, He gave me His help and did for me what I could not previously do for myself.

In the subsequent twenty-three years, I realize that I had allowed fear to become larger than life itself.  Fear defeats us when we are unwilling to confront it.  Norman Vincent Peale posits, “Do the thing you most fear and the death of fear is certain.”  By God’s grace and power, I conquer each and every fear that emerges in my life.  Recall the childhood biblical story of David and Goliath.  The latter person, a nine-foot Philistine giant, awakes each morning and instills paralyzing fear in the minds and hearts of the army of Israel merely by yelling insults across a valley.  Trained soldiers are so afraid to fight that they freeze and remain still hoping and praying Goliath will remain on his side of the valley.  Israel remains imprisoned to the Philistine giant until David appears and boldly confronts him with God’s power and strength.  Similarly, we as equal recipients of those divine gifts can defeat any fear regardless of its height, depth, breadth and width.  The simple yet significant prayer, “O God, I need Your help,” opens the door to a whole new life for you.