Prayer is essential for believers. So much so that D. L Moody once said, “to be a Christian without prayer is no more possible than to be alive without breathing.” Yet prayer is a spiritual discipline Christians struggle with a lot. Yours truly included. We all have seasons when prayer feels like a burden rather than a blessing, drudgery rather than delight, and sometimes, we need a little help to move forward. So I was glad to discover Kevin Halloran’s new book When Prayer is a Struggle: A Practical Guide for Overcoming Obstacles in Prayer.
As the title implies, When Prayer is a Struggle is a practical manual to a fruitful prayer life. In this book, Halloran lists nine common reasons Christians struggle to pray and provides useful tips to overcome them. Having struggled with praying himself, Halloran wrote this book to help other believers pursue a faithful and joyful prayer life.
He says, “My driving motivation for writing this book has been the belief that a life of faithful, fruitful, and joyful prayer is within the grasp of every Christian. God has helped me in spectacular ways, and I know that He will help you, too.”
The book has nine chapters. Each chapter explores a specific obstacle in prayer and ways to overcome them using a head-heart-hands approach. These obstacles are, I Forget Why Prayer Matters, I Don’t Know What to Pray, I Feel Too Guilty to Pray, I’m Not Sure God Hears Me, I Have Mixed Motives, I Can’t Focus, I’m So Unorganized, I’m Too Stressed, and I’m Too Busy. Every chapter also features a brief prayer and questions for reflection.
When Prayer is a Struggle is a short book but impactful. Halloran provides many helpful tips and recommendations that should immensely benefit believers who struggle to pray.
Halloran explains how the gospel address each struggle, reveals the potential heart issues causing the difficulty, and provides practical steps to overcome them. I love how practical (and biblical) this book is! Halloran loaded every chapter with helpful counsel readers can apply immediately. The book also features many real-life examples from past and present believers, and it provides another layer of inspiration.
I particularly benefited from the chapters on being distracted and having mixed motives as I struggle with these two the most. And I appreciated Halloran’s many tips for eliminating distractions during prayer and the heart check questions he provides to examine our motives.
Besides the prayer aids, I had three main takeways from this book. First, struggling in prayer is a good thing; it proves we genuinely desire to pray (no one struggles to do what we want to avoid). Second, we need to remember why we pray to motivate us to pray. And third, praying faithfully will be challenging, and we will never be perfect. But we must keep praying without losing heart because God is worthy of all our efforts.
Halloran also provides valuable materials in the appendix, such as a list of select Psalms categorized by topic or situation. I have meant to make a similar list since reading Praying the Bible by Donald Whitney, and I am glad Halloran did it for me!
In sum, I enjoyed When Prayer is a Struggle and highly recommend it! It will help you diagnose the issue hindering your prayers and equip you with biblical and practical tools to overcome them. It is an excellent book to have in your library and revisit whenever you struggle with prayer.
