The Power Born of Frailty

Every prayer, every effective approach to God by a human being, is born in one way or another of a sense of essential helplessness on the part of the person praying. Prayer will always be the product of recognizing that we do not have what it takes, that we lack the wisdom, the strength, the solution, the resources we need.

Prayer always arises from a man or woman who looks at himself or herself and says, “I don’t know what to do; I don’t have what I need. What it takes to prevail in this situation is not within me.” But prayer always goes beyond that initial recognition of insufficiency. After admitting their helplessness, the believer turns their eyes toward God, stretches out their hands, and opens their soul in expectation of the merciful answer of the heavenly Father. The words of Psalm 123 immediately come to mind:

1 To you I lifted up my eyes,

To you who dwell in the heavens.

2 Behold, as the eyes of servants look to the hand of their masters,

And as the eyes of a maidservant look to the hand of her mistress,

So our eyes look to Jehovah our God,

Until he has mercy on us.

I always say to the Lord, “Father, I am a clumsy child; take me by the hand and lead me along the path of life.” For if God left me to my own resources, my life would immediately descend into chaos.

Powerful and effective prayer is born of that great abyss that opens within us when we consider our essential helplessness. It is a healthy recognition that, as the title of the famous novel by the Peruvian writer Ciro Alegría suggests, “the world is wide and alien.” The world is populated by hostile forces. It is far more mysterious, unfathomable, and complex than our limited capacity can process. Left to our own resources, without the mighty arms of our heavenly Father to defend us and lift us out of the pit, we are like defenseless children in a jungle full of wild beasts.

That is the feeling of humility and total dependence expressed in Psalms 120 through 134, known as the “Songs of Ascents” or “Songs of the Ascents.” Psalm 124, in particular, expresses the writer’s overwhelming awareness that, were it not for Jehovah’s merciful intervention, he would easily have succumbed to the enemy’s merciless attacks:

1 Had Jehovah not been on our side,

Let Israel now say;

2 Had Jehovah not been on our side,

When men rose up against us,

3 Then they would have swallowed us alive,

When their fury was kindled against us.

4 Then the waters would have flooded us;

The torrent would have swept over our soul;

5 Then the raging waters would have swept over our soul.

6 Blessed be Jehovah,

Who did not give us as prey to their teeth.

7 Our soul escaped like a bird from the snare of the fowlers;

The snare was broken, and we escaped.

8 Our help is in the name of Jehovah,

Who made heaven and earth.

In his commentary on this beautiful psalm, Dr. Samuel Pagán writes:

The central message of the psalm recognizes divine intervention as an extraordinary source of salvation. The fundamental image that emerges from the poetry is that of a God who accompanies his people through the trials and anguish of human existence. The poet’s basic purpose is to affirm categorically that the people have not been alone and that, just as they experienced divine deliverance in the past, that same redeeming power is ready in the present and the future to answer the people’s cry. (From the Depths, Lord, I Cry to You, p. 625)

Blessed is the man or woman who recognizes their essential frailty and always entrusts themselves to the Almighty before undertaking anything important in life.