Recently, I did a year end exercise with my writing group. In the exercise, we wrote about our future goals in 2026 and also recapped what went well or not so well in 2025. There was one prompt that stopped me in my tracks. “What prayers were answered in 2025?”
Knowing I had been focused on improving the frequency and depth of my prayers in 2025, I was dismayed that when asked directly, my mind drew a blank. If I couldn’t remember my previous prayers and how they had been answered, I was missing part of the process. I couldn’t just make requests, expect Him to answer, the way I want of course, and then move onto the next request on my list. Was that what I had been doing? Was I praising Him for all the prayers he answered, even when, especially when, He answered them differently than I asked? Was I giving thanks for His great blessings? Was I adequately seeing these blessings in real time or only in hindsight? These were questions I was wrestling with as I stared at my blank writing prompt.
My inability to fill my paper with an endless list of answered prayers within the last year reminded me of when God saved the Israelites from Egyptian bondage. To free His people, God sent ten plagues, miraculous events to convince Pharaoh of His power and to let His people leave. The Israelites saw a variety of impossible things happen before their eyes- water from the Nile River turning into blood, swarms of locusts destroying the land, and boils appearing spontaneously on the Egyptian’s skin, to name a few. The final plague that finally convinced Pharoah to release the people was the death of all firstborn humans and animals in Egypt. This would include Pharoah’s first born son.
You can imagine the devastation the tenth plague caused and finally, the Israelites were freed. It was the final straw that broke Pharoah. He could no longer deny God’s power and love for His people. This would seem like the end of the story, but this fight was far from over. Realizing he had lost his slave labor force, Pharoah changed his mind and began to chase after the fleeing Israelites. The Israelites quickly found themselves in a bind. Facing the Red Sea on one side and an angry Egyptian army gaining ground on the other, it seemed like they were trapped. There was nowhere to go. In their despair, these were their words:
11 They said to Moses, “Is it because there are no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us in bringing us out of Egypt? 12 Is not this what we said to you in Egypt: ‘Leave us alone that we may serve the Egyptians’? For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness.” Exodus 14:11-12, ESV
In their fear, in the midst of the unknown, the Israelites called out to God with an ungrateful and unfaithful heart. They have just finished seeing Him perform miraculous wonders on their behalf and in a moment of panic, they are convinced that being slaves was better than following God’s plan for them. They had a sense of security in their slavery. Now being free people and facing danger, they doubt God. The Israelites can’t see how He is going to get them out of this situation and so they unleash their thankless hearts on Him. As the reader, their words to God seem shocking. How quickly they turned!
Moses’ response to them, however, is beautiful, one I need to repeat more often to myself in times of hardship.
13 And Moses said to the people, “Fear not, stand firm, and see the salvation of the Lord, which he will work for you today. For the Egyptians whom you see today, you shall never see again. 14 The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to be silent.”- Exodus 14:13-14 ESV
Many are familiar with how this story ends. The Lord tells Moses to raise his staff at the Red Sea and to divide the water so that the Israelites can walk on dry land. Moses does as the Lord commands and the sea parts. The people are able to cross on dry land and get to the other side, unharmed. When the Egyptians chase after them through the Red Sea, God instructs Moses to once again raise his staff and the water comes crashing back down on the Egyptian army, killing them. The Israelites could not see how they were going to get out of this situation. With their backs against the wall, danger on every side, they cried out to the Lord. Their solution was to go back to Egypt. If God had answered that cry, there would have been a much different ending to this story. God created a way and He delivered them.
This incident is one of many in which God would deliver His people through hardship and as time went by, they would forget about what God had done for them. The people would allow themselves to be overcome by fear. They would take matters into their own hands and “make” things happen instead of waiting on God. In moments of trouble and despair, it was as if they could no longer trust God. His previous promises kept had been erased from their minds, He had to prove Himself again. Do we have those same thoughts, those same memory lapses of how God has delivered us when we are in the trials of life?
Thinking back to my own prayer life and some of the challenges that came up in 2025, I know God heard my prayers. I know some prayers were directly answered, like illnesses improving and other requests would be resolved in His way and His time. Even when there weren’t tangible “results”, talking to God calmed my anxious heart and reminded me who was in charge. Thank goodness, it’s not me! I hadn’t made the connection at the time but I see it now- oftentimes, I need to “wait and be silent” (Exodus 14:14), as God is fighting for me. Maybe His fight for me will be in big, loud, sea splitting ways. Maybe it will be in quiet, unseen ways I won’t recognize or understand immediately. Either way, I need to come to Him in prayer with a faithful and grateful heart. A heart that remembers how He has taken care of me so many times before and faith He will take care of me, in His way, again.
Being a writer, I recently purchased a small notebook and put it by my bed where I normally say my first prayer of the day. I plan on using it to write my prayer requests down and also when a prayer has been answered so that I won’t forget all of the times God delivers me in 2026. I plan to fill up pages and pages of answered prayers at my 2027 writing retreat.
