When We Feel Helpless

Since I know it is all for Christ’s good, I am quite content with my weaknesses and with insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong. 2 Corinthians 12:10

John was supposed to be at the World Trade Center in New York City for a company meeting on September 11, 2001. The other senior officers were there in person, but John was in San Francisco with the company’s president, taking part in the meeting by conference call.

As John and the president listened in on the meeting, the first plane of the terrorist attack crashed into the tower that housed the company’s New York office. Almost immediately, city officials began evacuating the building.

John desperately wanted to help, but there was nothing he could do. He wanted to be there to help rescue his coworkers and others, but he was twenty-five hundred miles away. He wanted to help carry the wounded to safety, but he was only connected through the phone line from his own safe office building. The moment he felt most helpless was when he heard his friend’s final words on the phone as he plummeted to his death.

On that horrible day, John had to live with his feeling of helplessness. He hated being on the phone when people needed heroes in person. At that moment there was nothing he could do except pray. So pray he did—more fervently than he had ever done before.

In a time of horror and helplessness, John realized that prayer was the most aggressive, most effective thing he could do. Indeed, it was the only thing he could do.

How do you respond when life has you feeling weak and helpless? As men, we want action. We want to do something. But we need to realize, like John, that our most strategic assignment in the battle of life is prayer.

Lord, when I feel weak and ineffective—even helpless—please remind me that prayer is the most aggressive and effective thing I can do.