The Problems We Cannot Fix
Prayer and the Apparently Impossibile
We just can’t seem to get ahead.
Americans are not sleeping well these days. We are restless in body and in soul. We stay up too late, wake up too early, and try to live on caffeine and willpower. But beneath the lack of sleep there is another deficit—quieter, more dangerous. But what if we are missing the spiritual nutrients that come with a necessary part of life. What if we are not prayed-up, as my football coach used to put it? A prayer defect will rob the soul, and thus, the body of peace. When our prayer reservoirs are low, we get busy, informed, stimulated, and yet strangely hollow. Prayer is a companion to sleep. And to well-being.
Scripture does not treat prayer as an elective for the unusually devout. It is closer to breathing. When the promises of God collide with the impossibilities of life, prayer is where the impact is felt. That is why the story of the Shunammite woman in 2 Kings 4 has stayed with me for years. It is not just an ancient narrative; it is a mirror for our lives.
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A Child, a Field, and a Funeral That Should Not Be
The Bible tells us about a woman of Shunem, a woman of some means, who opened her home to the prophet Elisha. Over time, hospitality turned into a kind of quiet, holy friendship. She and her husband prepared a small room for him—a bed, a table, a chair, a lamp. Nothing grand. Just a place for the man of God to rest.
One day Elisha inquires about her deepest need. He sees through the polite answers. She has no child, and her husband is old. The promise comes: she will bear a son. And so she does. Against the odds, against biology, the boy is born. Sound familiar? You’re right. This impossible has a pattern. So, the boy grows. He runs out into the fields, the way little boys do, in the bright, indifferent sun.
Then, suddenly, his head hurts. He is carried back to his mother. He sits on her lap until noon—and dies. Scripture is plain. No euphemism. No sentimental veil. The child dies on his mother’s lap.
There are people who can read that sentence and move on. There are others who cannot. If you have buried a child, or a marriage, or a calling, you recognize the abruptness. One hour you are tending the field. The next hour you are arranging for a funeral you never imagined.
The Shunammite woman does something peculiar. She does not prepare the boy’s body. She carries him upstairs and lays him on the bed she had prepared for the prophet. The room of hospitality becomes, in a sense, a sanctuary. Then she closes the door.
She asks her husband for a donkey and a servant. He wonders why she is going to the man of God; it is not a feast day, not a Sabbath. In other words: “Why now?” Her answer is terse, almost defiant: “All is well.” Not because all is well in the ordinary sense. The boy is still dead upstairs. But somewhere beneath the shock, she has decided that the only honest way to face this impossible grief is to bring it to the one who speaks for the living God.
There are moments when explanation is a luxury you cannot afford. You simply saddle the donkey and go.
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Running to the Mediator
When Elisha sees her at a distance, he sends his servant Gehazi to ask the usual pastoral questions: Is it well with you? Is it well with your husband? Is it well with the child? Her answer, again, is, “All is well.” She has no time for intermediaries of intermediaries. She presses on until she reaches Elisha himself, falls at his feet, and will not be pushed away.
The Old Testament often teaches by shadows and types. Elisha is not Christ, but he foreshadows Christ. He is a man who stands, as it were, between God and the people, carrying their cries into the presence of the Lord. The Shunammite woman understands, in the rough outline of Old Testament faith, what the New Testament declares in fullness: we need a mediator.
Left to ourselves, we will treat prayer as a technique—another tool in the box of religious coping mechanisms. But the Bible will not let us. Prayer is not talking into the void. It is going to Someone. The woman of Shunem does not scatter her grief to the wind; she drives it, like a nail, toward one point: the man of God.
In the light of the Gospel, we see that the true and final Mediator is Jesus Christ, “the one mediator between God and men.” He has lived the life we have botched, borne the judgment our sins deserve, and risen as the living High Priest who “ever lives to make intercession” for His people. Prayer, then, is neither a vague spirituality nor a dignified self-talk. It is bringing our impossible situation to a living Lord whose pierced hands still bear our names.
When the culture grows more fragmented and anxious, it is tempting to look for rescue in technique, in politics, in therapy, in charisma. But the Shunammite woman, in her unadorned grief, points us a different way. She does not seek a strategy. She seeks a mediator.
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The Problems We Cannot Fix
Modern people do not like the word “impossible.” We prefer “challenging” or “complicated.” But Scripture is blunt. There are realities we cannot manage.
There is, first, the spiritual conflict that Paul describes to the Ephesians—a battle “not against flesh and blood,” but against unseen powers that resist the knowledge of God. We feel it in a thousand small disruptions: the coldness of our hearts, the distractions in worship, the quiet tug away from Christ.
Then there is the more terrifying reality we’d rather not name: we will stand before God. Either Christ will return, or our lives will end, and the lines of our brief years will be seen from one end to the other. We will stand there in our own record or in the righteousness of another. There is no third option.
No educational degree, no personal charm, no Southern respectability can carry us through that judgment. We either pay ourselves, eternally, for our rebellion, or we rest in the finished work of the Son who paid it in our stead. Prayer becomes, in that context, not a pious hobby but the very posture of faith: the empty hands held out to receive Christ and all His benefits.
So when someone says, “I don’t have any problems I can’t fix,” you know they simply haven’t yet looked long enough at their own heart, or at the grave that waits for them, or at the holy God before whom we must all appear.
When Heaven Seems Silent
There is another question, and it is not theoretical. What about those who have prayed and prayed and have not received the answer they longed for?
In pastoral life, I have sat with believers who carry years of depression, chronic pain, broken relationships, or unanswered cries for conversion in their families. They are not prayerless. In fact, some of them pray more than any of us. They live, as one man told me, “on my knees.”
The first task in such a moment is not to defend God but to reflect Him. Christ did not stand at a distance from the weeping and the confused. He drew near. He wept at Lazarus’s tomb even though He knew resurrection was coming. The Incarnate Son has dignified the tears of His people. He did not hurry them.
I once spoke with a minister who had carried a lifelong burden of depression. He had begged God for relief. He had served faithfully, preached faithfully, shepherded faithfully—and still the darkness sat at the edge of his days. “I don’t understand why God won’t take this away,” he said.
I asked him to tell me about his life of prayer. He looked at me almost surprised. “Prayer,” he said, “is my life. I have nowhere else to go.”
It seemed to me that this man, precisely through his unanswered plea, had been drawn into a life many pastors never know: a sustained, dogged, humble dependence upon God. His suffering had not made him noble; it had made him needy. And that neediness had taken the shape of prayer. I told him, as gently as I could, that I would happily sit under the preaching of a man who lived that close to the throne of grace.
The cross is our ultimate school in unanswered prayer. Our Lord cried, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken Me?” No answer came. No angels rushed to remove the nails. The silence of that Friday was real. Yet that silence was not the absence of God but the working out of His deepest mercy. The refusal to rescue the Son became the salvation of the world.
Which is to say: God’s apparent silence is not the same as God’s indifference. His delays are not His denials. He will answer in His way, in His time—and the final answer is always resurrection. Sometimes, by God’s sheer kindness, we taste that resurrection in this life: a changed heart, a healed body, a prodigal son returning home. Other times, we wait until the last day, when He wipes away every tear and sets creation right.
But for those who are in Christ, there is no wasted suffering and no unanswered prayer that will not one day make sense in the light of the Lamb who was slain and now lives.
No Lost Causes in Christ
The story in 2 Kings 4 closes with the boy restored to life. Elisha prays. He stretches himself out over the child. The flesh grows warm. The boy sneezes seven times and opens his eyes. His mother is called. She comes, falls at Elisha’s feet, and then gathers her living child in her arms.
Not every story in this life ends that way. Many graves remain occupied. Many prodigals are still far away. But this resurrection in the prophet’s chamber is a sign, a down payment of the greater resurrection to come. It tells us something vital about the God who hears prayer: with Him, there are no lost causes, except the one who persists to the very end in refusing His Son.
The Gospel does not promise a pain-free life, nor does it turn prayer into a lever by which we maneuver God. It promises something better: a Mediator who will never abandon His own, a cross that absorbs the worst we have done and suffered, and an empty tomb that guarantees that nothing in Him is finally in vain.
So perhaps the first step for many of us is simply to admit that our spiritual reservoirs are low. We have been managing instead of praying, performing instead of confessing, worrying instead of watching. The Shunammite woman shows us another way.
You do not have to know how your story will end to saddle the donkey and go. You do not have to have tidy answers to fall at the feet of the One greater than Elisha, the risen Christ. You only have to know that your child, your hope, your very life lies upstairs, beyond your power to revive.
Then prayer becomes, not an item on a list, but the severely honest act of a heart that has run out of itself and into God. And there, in that quiet surrender, the impossible God—who raises the dead and justifies the ungodly—meets us, not with spectacle, but with a mercy that will never let us go.
