Help Thou Mine Unbelief

He prays for his daughter every night and he does not believe much of it.

That is the thing he would not say at the men's breakfast. He goes. He is respected there. When the prayer requests go round he says her name and people pray warmly and he is glad of it.

But when he is alone in the car outside the house, at half eleven, having not gone in yet, what he says to God is much shorter and much worse.

If You can do anything about this.

He hears himself say it. He knows what the if is doing. And he has decided that a man who prays like that is not praying, he is complaining upward, and that God is under no obligation to take any notice of it.

So there is a second layer on top of the first. He is frightened for his daughter, and he is also ashamed that his fear has eaten his faith, and the shame has started to make the praying harder rather than easier.

Here is the sentence he has never said out loud.

He thinks his daughter would be better served by somebody with a stronger faith praying for her, and that his own prayers are, at best, not counting.

Read what the father actually said

There is a scene in Mark with a father in it, and the sentence he says is one of the most human lines in the book.

And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.Mark 9:24

Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.

And look at what he had said a moment before, which is the part that matters to you. If thou canst do any thing, have compassion on us, and help us. The exact word. The same if.

Jesus notices the if and pushes back on it, and the man does not defend himself and does not manufacture anything. He says both halves in one breath: I believe, and my belief has holes in it, and please deal with the holes.

And then read the next verse. The boy is healed. Not after the father's faith improved. Not on condition that he came back when he had sorted himself out.

Your praying is received with the holes in it rather than blocked by them, and Mark 9:24 has a father saying both halves and the child healed in the next verse. That is what the word actually records, not comfort I am extending, and the Holy Spirit is the One who carries a half-believing prayer out of a car at half eleven.

The burden is not on the strength of your faith

Now the plain thing, and I want to be careful because this is exactly where fathers get hurt.

There is a way of teaching about faith that puts the outcome for a sick child onto the quality of a parent's believing, and it has done more damage than almost anything else I have seen in thirty years, and it is not what that passage says.

If the mechanism were the father's faith, the boy stays ill. The father openly says his faith is defective. The healing happens anyway, and it happens because of who Jesus is, and the passage is at pains to show us that.

So the shame you are carrying about the if is not conviction. It is not from Him. Nothing in that chapter is aimed at a frightened parent's inadequate belief except a hand reaching past it.

And nothing about the holes in your faith has ever disqualified a prayer for your child. Scripture puts the healing on Christ and never on the father's certainty, and the Holy Spirit is not weighing a frightened man's confidence before He listens.

Pray it in the honest words

Here is the practical piece, and it goes against every instinct you've got.

Say the honest version. Out loud. Including the if.

Not a tidied version for God's benefit, because He was there in the car for all of them anyway and the tidying is for you rather than Him. Say what you actually think: I am frightened. I do not know that You will. If You can do anything, do it. Help what is missing in me.

That is not a weaker prayer than the one you would say at the breakfast. It is the same prayer that got a boy healed in Mark, more or less word for word, and it has the enormous advantage of being true, which means you can keep saying it for years without it collapsing.

You are able to pray with the doubt in the sentence, and the doubt was never what stood in the way. Mark 9:24 has Him answering a man who had just said if thou canst, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes an honest prayer sayable in a driveway.