“PRAYER does not directly take away a trial or its pain, any more than a sense of duty directly takes away the danger of infection, but it preserves the strength of the whole spiritual fiber, so that the trial does not pass into the temptation to sin. A sorrow comes upon you. Omit prayer, and you fall out of God’s testing into the devil’s temptation; you get angry, hard of heart, reckless. But meet the dreadful hour with prayer, cast your care on God, claim Him as your Father, though He seem cruel — and the degrading, paralyzing, embittering effects of pain and sorrow pass away; a stream of sanctifying and softening thought pours into the soul; and that which might have wrought your fall but works in you the peaceful fruit of righteousness. You pass from bitterness into the courage of endurance; and from endurance into battle; and from battle into victory; till at last the trial dignifies and blesses your life.
The force of prayer is not altogether effective at once. Its action is cumulative. At first there seems no answer to your exceeding bitter cry. But there has been an answer. God has heard. A little grain of strength, not enough to be conscious of, has been given in one way or another. A friend has come in and grasped your hand — you have heard the lark sprinkle his notes like raindrops on the earth — a text has stolen into your mind, you know not how. Next morning you awake with the old aching at the heart, but the grain of strength has kept you alive — and so it goes on; hour by hour, day by day, prayer brings its tiny sparks of light till they orb into a star; its grains of strength till they grow into an anchor of the soul, sure and steadfast. The answer to prayer is slow; the force of prayer is cumulative. Not till life is over is the whole answer given, the whole strength it has brought understood.