Wrestling with God

Philip Yancey's most recent book, Prayer: Does It Make a Difference?, explores prayer and the attendant struggles that we all have with prayer in our own various ways. He comments about the "polite" prayers that are prayed in most churches, and shares a prayer that quieted one church service that he attended. One young woman during the prayer time prayed with a quavering voice, "God, I hated you after the rape! How could you let this happen to me? And I hated the people in this church who tried to comfort me. I didn't want comfort. I wanted revenge. I wanted to hurt back. I thank you, God, that you didn't give up on me, and neither did some of these people. You kept after me, and I come back to you now and ask that you heal the scars of my soul."

Yancey calls this a "testy prayer," and notes that the Bible is full of them, prayers prayed by Abraham and Moses, for example, that aren't the polite kinds of prayers that "good Christians" tend to pray. In fact he likens prayer to wrestling, and quotes E. M. Bounds who wrote, "Prayer in its highest form and grandest success assumes the attitude of a wrestler with God." How do you experience prayer in your own life? Do you ever wrestle with God like Jacob wrestled with the angel, or the way that Abraham and Moses argued with God?