Questions to Ask God
Twenty questions to bring to prayer, a journal, or a long walk. They move from gratitude and daily attention toward the harder ground of anger, unanswered prayer, and doubt, which is the order most people can actually manage.
The questions
Open any question for the note
What do you want me to notice today?
Why ask it
A deliberately small opening question, because starting with life purpose tends to produce nothing. Answers arrive as ordinary specifics: a person, a task, a room. If nothing comes, that usually means the day is too full rather than that the question failed.
What am I thankful for that I have stopped noticing?
Why ask it
Gratitude lists go stale because people name the same three things. This version asks for what has gone invisible, which is where the honest answers are: health, a functioning household, someone who has not left.
Who in my life needs something from me that I have been pretending not to see?
Why ask it
Most people can answer this in about four seconds, which is the point. The speed of the answer is evidence you already knew. What follows is a decision, not a discernment problem.
What am I afraid to ask you for?
Why ask it
Reveals where faith is actually thin. The usual candidates are the prayer already refused once, and the desire the person believes is too selfish to say aloud. Naming it is often the whole of the work.
What have I been calling a calling that is really just ambition?
Why ask it
A hard question because the two feel identical from the inside. A working test: ambition needs to be seen, vocation does not. If the plan collapses when nobody notices it, that is worth knowing before more years go into it.
What do you want me to do about the thing I keep putting off?
Why ask it
Avoidance is more specific than sin in general, and it names itself readily. The useful follow up is what the delay is costing someone else, which is usually the part that has gone unexamined.
Where am I asking you to bless a decision I have already made?
Why ask it
The most common way prayer gets misused, and nearly everyone does it. If the honest answer is that no response would change the plan, then this is not a question but a request for cover, and it is better to admit that.
What am I meant to be learning here, and how long have I been avoiding it?
Why ask it
The second half stops the question from becoming a way to make suffering tidy. Sometimes the answer is that the lesson was learned long ago and the situation is simply being tolerated out of fear of change.
What do I need to let go of, and what am I getting out of holding on?
Why ask it
Nobody keeps a grudge, a job, or a habit for no reason. The payoff is usually identity or safety. Naming what the attachment provides is the only thing that makes letting go anything more than a resolution.
Who do I need to forgive, and what would forgiving actually cost me?
Why ask it
Forgiveness talk stays abstract until the cost is named: giving up the story of being wronged, or seeing someone again. A bad answer here is one that forgives in general and no one in particular.
Who do I need to ask forgiveness from?
Why ask it
Harder than the previous question because it cannot be completed privately. Watch for the answer that lands on someone conveniently dead or unreachable, which is often a way of avoiding the living person on the list.
Where have I used you as a reason to avoid something difficult?
Why ask it
Waiting on God and refusing to act can look the same from outside and feel the same inside. The distinguishing question is whether the waiting has a condition attached, or whether it has quietly become permanent.
What would you have me do about the person I cannot love?
Why ask it
More useful than asking to be made loving, because it asks for an action rather than a feeling. Answers tend to be small and unsatisfying: speak civilly, stop recruiting allies, pray for them by name. That smallness is not a failure of the question.
What do you see when you look at me?
Why ask it
Reveals what a person actually believes about themselves rather than what they profess. If the answer that surfaces is entirely condemning, that is worth examining, because it is usually a familiar voice from earlier in life rather than a new one.
What am I angry with you about?
Why ask it
Many people have never allowed this question and are surprised how fast something arrives. Unspoken anger is what quietly ends prayer, more often than doubt does. Naming it is not irreverence; suppressing it is what causes the silence.
Why has this not stopped?
Why ask it
One of the oldest complaints in scripture and the one least likely to receive an answer. Asking it plainly is still worth doing, because the alternative is manufacturing a reason yourself and then having to defend it.
Where were you when I needed you and nothing happened?
Why ask it
This should be asked about a specific occasion, with a date, not about suffering in general. People who ask it concretely often find the grievance was never about the event itself but about being alone in it.
If I am wrong about you, how would I know?
Why ask it
A question that takes the possibility of being mistaken seriously instead of treating doubt as a threat. A belief with no answer to it may still be true, but it is being held in a way that cannot be examined.
What do you want me to do with the time I have left?
Why ask it
Different from asking about purpose, because it starts from a finite amount. It tends to produce answers about people rather than achievements, and the specificity of who is named is the useful part.
What have I never said to you that I should say now?
Why ask it
A closing question that leaves room for whatever the earlier ones stirred and did not resolve. What comes is often not a request at all but something withheld for years, and it is worth writing down rather than only thinking.
Praying With These Questions
Practical guidance for the conversation itself
How to Use Them
One Question, Not Twenty
Working down a list turns prayer into an inventory. Take one question and stay with it for several days. The second and third day are usually where the real answer arrives, because the first response is the rehearsed one.
Write, Do Not Only Think
Written answers are harder to fudge than remembered ones, and they can be read back a month later. Date each entry. The pattern across six months of entries tends to say more than any single sitting.
Start With the Early Questions
The questions about anger, absence, and doubt are worth asking, but not first. Beginning there without any established practice usually ends the practice. The order in this list is deliberate.
Set an End Time
Fifteen minutes with a timer is more sustainable than an open ended session that becomes a duty. Stopping while there is still something to say is what makes people come back the next day.
What an Answer Tends to Look Like
- Usually a specific and unwelcome next step rather than a general reassurance. Answers that flatter should be held loosely.
- Often something already known and set aside. Recognition rather than revelation is the ordinary experience.
- Sometimes a line of scripture or a remembered sentence that will not leave. Worth noting where it came from before deciding what it means.
- Frequently through another person saying something they had no way of knowing was relevant.
- Occasionally nothing at all, for a long time. Silence is reported in almost every serious spiritual account and does not mean the practice has failed.
- Rarely a voice. Most traditions counsel caution about instructions that arrive with unusual certainty, particularly ones concerning other people.
Where This Goes Wrong
Asking Only for Verdicts
Questions phrased as yes or no about a decision tend to return whatever the asker already wanted. Ask what you are not seeing about the decision instead, which is answerable in a way a verdict is not.
Treating Discernment as Delay
There is a point at which continuing to pray about a choice is a way of not making it. If nothing new has surfaced in weeks, the information you are waiting for probably does not exist.
Skipping the Anger
People who cannot say what they are angry about usually stop praying rather than argue. Every major tradition contains complaint addressed directly to God, which suggests the objection is not the problem.
Using Prayer Instead of Help
Persistent hopelessness, an unsafe home, or thoughts of self harm need a doctor, a counsellor, or a crisis line as well as prayer. Naming that is not a lack of faith, and the two are not in competition.