CREDIT: ADAMGREGOR / THINKSTOCK
Is praying the answer for how to do well on exams? As long as you do the due diligence and study, it can't hurt to try.

Maybe you have found yourself saying a prayer to help you pass a mid-term or exam. It is very common for people to pray when they are in trouble. At least one video taken on a boat crammed with Syrian refugees shows them praying when their engine quit. And it is said that in the battlefield there are no, or at least fewer, atheists. Maybe there are also fewer atheists in college on exam days.

First, if the only time you pray is when you are in trouble, you are at least making a start and you would not be alone. There are many prayers collected in the Jewish-Christian Bible. The collection is called the book of Psalms.

Those 150 prayers or psalms come from the hearts of people in trouble. Often the person praying is looking for guidance; sometimes they are looking for forgiveness; very often they are looking for victory over, or at least escape from, violent enemies.

In other words, the person praying is in a life or death situation and they are looking to God for help. Therefore, when you are in trouble, even if you have not been the most faithful person who has ever prayed, don’t let that prevent you from asking God for help. Just don’t be insincere about it.

Second, you can unload things that might surprise you when you pray. Again, I’m looking at the Psalms. One of the things we find disturbing about the Psalms is that many of them ask God to make life miserable for the enemy.

The writers typically asked God to see to it that their enemies were killed, or at least shamed and left empty-handed. Typically, we recoil from such prayers. They can leave us horrified because we are aware of the power of religious words of violence to inspire violent action.

But there is another way of reading those sections in the Psalms asking God to put down the enemy. It is a way of leaving the fate of the enemy in the hands of God.

Such a prayer exposes the writer to the real possibility that his enemies might live to see the light of day, though they might not get away with their plans to kill him.

The payoff for us is that we can leave in our prayers what we might desire in the heat of the moment. But once we have expressed to God our passion for revenge or wealth or whatever, there is the risk that we won’t get our way. Once we put something in the hands of God, it’s his prerogative what to do with it.

But now, going back to prayer for exams, I would say, start praying early in the term. If you do, you are more likely going to realize that it isn’t appropriate to avoid proper assignment completion and pre-exam study while expecting God to clean up the mess. In other words, prayer can help us to see our responsibilities and to accept them.

Finally, is prayer real and is there really a God to hear and respond to them?

The other day a parent and business owner in one of my churches told me about his many anxieties. Some of the areas of his business were failing and worst of all, there were family tensions. We prayed about these things, asking God to provide a way forward for this man and his family.

About 30 hours later I saw him at an evening function. At one point he took me aside and said, “Remember what I told you yesterday and our prayers?”

“Yes,” I said.

He then went on to say, later that same day in the evening, a young family member had come home from a day-long church fundraiser for a refugee family and said the experience had thrilled her.

Some of the other family members had met to rehearse and perform music at his home. One of the young teens showed up the same evening after being on a two-day retreat at a large nearby church, a retreat that involved 450 youth doing an afternoon of community service.

My friend saw what his family members brought into his home that evening, an answer to our prayers. He sensed that God was at work in his family, and that was the one thing that really counted.

So, if you pray for success in exams or in the other parts of school work, and you begin to accept responsibility to do what you can all through the term, don’t be too surprised to find your prayers answered with a “yes”. Such things are not uncommon; we should expect to see them often.
Editorial opinions or comments expressed in this online edition of Interrobang newspaper reflect the views of the writer and are not those of the Interrobang or the Fanshawe Student Union. The Interrobang is published weekly by the Fanshawe Student Union at 1001 Fanshawe College Blvd., P.O. Box 7005, London, Ontario, N5Y 5R6 and distributed through the Fanshawe College community. Letters to the editor are welcome. All letters are subject to editing and should be emailed. All letters must be accompanied by contact information. Letters can also be submitted online by clicking here.