When My Life Was on "Plan W," What I Learned About Praying with Faith

Life rarely goes the way we want it to, which is why it's nice to have a "plan B." But what happens when our "plan B," "plan C," and even "plan Z" don't work out? TOFW presenter Laurel C. Day shares in her book The Faith Experiment how we can rely on faith and seek God's will when our plans for life don't work out the way we want them to.

I don’t know about you, but I had a “plan A” for my life. (Surely I am not the only girl who attempted to plan out her life.) I remember sitting around with some of my girlfriends one day when we were all in college. We were discussing my “plan A,” and that led to “plan B” ... which led me to think about “plan C.” I sort of wrote out my life plans and realized that I was already on “plan K.” (And this was a problem because I hadn’t even served a mission yet. By the time I went on my mission, I was beyond “plan K.”)

Several years later, after the mission, I was with another group of friends, kind of going through the same thing, and by then I was on “plan W.” It’s safe to say I am now in the Greek alphabet somewhere, perhaps plan “kappa”?

I suppose because I had beliefs (hopes?) about some things that would happen in my life, when they didn’t happen, I started to develop ideas that I now see were false—ideas about what Heavenly Father wanted or what He didn’t want for my life, ideas about what I was worthy of having in my life. I really struggled with that concept and found myself developing a belief that, for whatever reason, God wasn’t going to ever give me what I really wanted.

I would sit in church and hear the scripture that reads: “What man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone?” (Matthew 7:9). I found it odd that the scripture was stated in such a way to express that the premise was ridiculous—because I didn’t find it so ridiculous.

Instead, my little heart would want to say, “Why is that such an absurd question to ask? I actually feel like I’ve asked for bread plenty of times and received a stone. Pretty stones and perfectly nice stones ... but stones nonetheless.” And because I felt this way, I simply stopped asking. It was easier to not ask—to be His dutiful, obedient daughter who was content with what she had—than to ask and risk being disappointed by a sincere petition going unanswered yet again.

And so, when I found myself with a back injury shortly into my half-marathon training, I was desperate for some help and I couldn’t bring myself to ask my Father in Heaven for it. I ended up at the home of a dear friend requesting a priesthood blessing. In the blessing, without knowing very much about how I felt—for sure without knowing how I felt about this particular scripture—he said, “Your Father wants to give you bread when you ask for bread.”

It was as if time stopped. I don’t remember hearing anything else. And I found myself asking, “What if He does? What if He really wants to give me bread? And I just haven’t asked?” I knew that day that if something was going to change in my life, particularly where faith was concerned, I had to be willing to ask for bread.

When you haven’t asked for anything for a while, it can be a little scary to start up again. I couldn’t handle the thought of setting myself up and determined that I couldn’t just ask amiss. I knew that if I was asking for bread, it had better be the right kind of bread. So I went to my scriptures again. This time I ended up at 3 Nephi 18:20: “And whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name, which is right, believing that ye shall receive, behold it shall be given unto you” (emphasis added).

The “which is right” phrase took me to the Doctrine and Covenants: “Behold, you have not understood; you have supposed that I would give it unto you, when you took no thought save it was to ask me. But, behold, I say unto you, that you must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right, and if it is right I shall cause that your bosom shall burn within you; therefore, you shall feel that it is right” (D&C 9:7–8).

After pondering that scripture, I knew that if I was going to ask for bread—especially if I was going to ask in faith—I had to know that it was okay to ask for this particular brand of bread. And that has become my pattern for prayer. Instead of just asking for those things that I desire, or that I want most in my life, I first go to my Father and ask Him if it is right to ask for that thing. All I can tell you is this: 

Once you know that the thing you are praying for is acceptable to God—that it’s an okay thing to ask for—it completely changes your ability to pray with faith.

Want more from Laurel C. Day? Find her at a TOFW event near you! But if you can't make it (because, you know, life can get pretty crazy) then be sure to check out her book The Faith Experiment available on deseretbook.com and Deseret Book stores.