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For years, I prayed that God would change my ex-husband. I prayed that God would soften his heart, make him kinder, make him easier to co-parent with, or for God to help him become the kind of man I believed he could be. I prayed that God would convict him, transform him, and bring him to a place of repentance. After all, Scripture tells us in Matthew 19:26 that “with God all things are possible.” If God can part the Red Sea, raise the dead, and transform Saul the persecutor into Paul the apostle, surely He could change the heart of one man.
So I prayed. And prayed. And prayed some more.
For a long time, nothing changed. Or at least nothing changed in him. And that created a tension in my faith that I didn’t quite know what to do with. I watched all these women who had prayed their husbands into a relationship with God. So why not mine? If God can change anyone’s heart, and I was faithfully praying for that change, why wasn’t it happening? Was I not praying hard enough? Was I not praying correctly? Did I lack faith?
Eventually I brought those questions into therapy. In one of our sessions, my therapist gave me an illustration that shifted the way I thought about the whole situation. She said, “Imagine you tell your child to stay home while you run to the store. You give clear instructions not to leave the house. But while you’re gone, your child decides to go next door to play anyway. Does your child’s disobedience somehow negate the fact that you told them to stay home?”
Of course not. The instruction was still given. The authority was still there. The child simply chose not to obey it.
The same principle applies to God. Just because God tells someone something does not mean they will listen. Just because God convicts someone or calls them to change does not mean they will obey. Human beings have the ability to resist God, ignore Him, and walk in the opposite direction of what He says. Scripture is full of examples of this. God sent prophets to Israel again and again, warning them, correcting them, calling them back to Himself. Many times, they refused to listen. Their disobedience did not mean God had failed to speak; it meant they had chosen to not obey.
That realization changed something for me. For years I had quietly assumed that if I prayed for someone long enough, God would eventually change them. But prayer is not a mechanism for controlling another person’s will. God can transform hearts, and sometimes He does so dramatically. However, He does not force repentance on people who refuse it. Even Jesus encountered people who heard the truth yet rejected it.
Once I understood that, I also began to see something else more clearly. While the person I had been praying for wasn’t changing, something was happening in me. God was slowly teaching me to live in the reality of the situation rather than constantly hoping that tomorrow would finally be different. He was teaching me to get out of the hope cycle and to stop placing my hope in someone else’s transformation, but to start placing it where it belonged.
Psalm 62:5 says, “Find rest, O my soul, in God alone; my hope comes from Him.” For a long time, my hope had been tied to the idea that another person would eventually become who I hoped they would be. But hope rooted in another person’s behavior is fragile. It rises and falls depending on what they do. Hope rooted in God is different. It remains steady even when people do not change in the way we hoped they would.
None of this means we stop praying for people. Prayer still matters. God still works in ways we cannot see. But sometimes prayer does something different than what we expected. Sometimes instead of changing the person we are praying for, God changes the one who is doing the praying. He gives clarity, wisdom, and the courage to stop waiting for someone else to become the person we wish they were.
There is a strange kind of freedom that comes when you finally understand this. You can still pray for someone, still hope that one day they might choose a different path, but you no longer build your life around the expectation that they will. You entrust them to God and begin living honestly within the reality of what is.
And sometimes that is exactly the answer God was giving all along.
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