Prayer: Am I Doing it Wrong?

Wednesday, December 10, 2025
written by Rev. Dr. Mike Hegeman

At our Wednesday noontime gathering, called SAGE (Senior Adults Gaining Enrichment), we have been exploring the topic of prayer this month. We framed our three-week exploration as “Prayer: Am I Doing it Wrong?”

To tell you the truth, there is very little with regard to prayer that I would categorize as the “wrong” way to do it. I even hesitate to say that there are more “effective” ways of doing prayer. “Effective prayer” presupposes that we’re trying to “achieve” something through prayer. Well, aren’t we? You might ask. That can be true if we pray solely for “outcomes”: realizing health, procuring financial security, finding a soulmate, or experiencing global peace. 

The primary mode of prayer is to enter into being, that is, just being with God. Now, I didn’t come into this understanding of prayer early in life. And, I’m sure that I default to “asking” prayers more often than not. But when I truly settle into “praying,” I most often enter a “Be still and know I am God” moment. I repeat this phrase over and over, without rushing. Most often, I sing it. And I just spend time being. For me, this is the foundation of prayer. All the “asking” follows after this. 

My “asking” prayers, if you could see inside my imagination, look more like the ideal of health and wholeness in body, mind, and spirit for myself and for whoever I am praying. I learned this technique early in life. When I was 16, I read a book called The Healing Light by Agnes Sanford. She was an Episcopal laywoman who espoused a type of healing prayer where one envisaged the light of God surrounding the person for whom one was praying. In this light, you were to “see” the person transformed into their perfect state of being. She identified this “light” as Jesus Christ. In him, she saw all things as whole. Instead of trying to achieve someone’s wellness, she prayed in such a way as to see and know that person as whole in God, beyond disease, fear, guilt, shame, and sadness. Just whole. Prayer in this way becomes an act of faithful and creative imagination. Not a “God fix it!” but an event of being with God in such a way that one cannot help but witness the transformation God is already doing. 

I like this kind of prayer, even though I spend a lot of time in the kind of prayer that asks God to “make it all right.” 

So, is there a “wrong” way to do prayer? Perhaps. If I pray out of my own fear, anger, resentment, mistrust, selfishness, or shame, I don’t think my prayers go very far. Sometimes we cannot escape the negative emotions we feel, and we need to pray anyway. “Being with God in prayer” can help transform those emotions and turn them toward love, trust, compassion, understanding, and magnanimity. 

As I write this, I invite myself as well as you to find ways to spend more time in “being with God” prayer. Doing so, the “shopping list” prayers seem more likely to take care of themselves. We might just say, “God, I’ve got a whole list of things on my mind. How about we just spend some time together, and I’ll just leave the list with you.”

And maybe God would respond, “Be still and know that I AM.”