I realised I had been treating prayer like a customer-service complaint

I used to come to God with a list of issues, a vague sense of outrage, and the expectation that somebody should sort it out.

For a long time, prayer felt a bit like ringing customer services after being charged twice for something.

You only really did it when things had gone wrong. You were already annoyed before anyone answered. You had a list in your head, some fairly reasonable points to make, and the faint hope that whoever picked up might finally explain why your life had become so needlessly difficult.

That was probably closer to my relationship with God than I realised.

When illness and death tore a savage and relentless path through my nearest and dearest, I prayed because I had nowhere else to put the anger. I did not arrive peaceful or holy. I arrived exhausted, confused and increasingly convinced that somebody needed to answer for all this.

There were plenty of prayers that were basically: God! What is going on here, mate?

And fair enough, really.

The strange part is that prayer did not become meaningful because I suddenly started getting what I wanted. There were no neat answers. No heavenly customer-service representative explaining the delays and assuring me that my complaint had been escalated.

It became meaningful because, slowly, I stopped treating God like someone who owed me a solution and started speaking to Him like He was actually there, walking through it with me. I started seeing Him as a teammate.

Sometimes that still means asking for help. Sometimes it means asking the same thing repeatedly because I am tired, scared or angry. Sometimes it means sitting there with nothing clever to say at all.

But I am beginning to understand that prayer is less about submitting a case and more about refusing to carry the whole bloody thing alone.

And, considering the state of my case, that is probably a good job.