Rivers in the Desert

My childhood home was a big, yellow farmhouse with a picket fence. I slept in a blush-pink room with a dormer that overlooked the front yard. I’d sit in the window and read or watch the neighbors walk their dogs and jog laps around the block. And while the room and the home were beautiful, I was still afraid of the dark.

My brother and I slept upstairs, while our parents’ bedroom was on the main floor. With the door shut and the lights off, I was isolated and could barely hear the laugh tracks from Dad’s sitcoms echoing from the living room below. 

When cars drove past outside, their headlights kaleidoscoped around the room and cast shadows across the pink walls. My vision, fuzzy in the dark, played tricks on me, and the robe on the back of my door transformed into a ghoul, ready to drag me away from my family. The popcorn on the ceiling shifted into thousands of spiders creeping above my bed. 

But the nightmares didn’t end when the sun rose. Many times, Mom or Dad would run errands, leaving me and my brother behind. I would get sick with worry—what if they got into a car accident? What if someone broke into the house while they were gone? 

These hypotheticals began to take over my thoughts, and at some point, I shared some of my fears with my parents. And like good parents do, they reassured me. Dad was a good driver—they would be fine running errands. We had a security system—no one would break into the house. There weren’t any monsters under my bed—I just needed to clean my room.

And they gave me a tip — whenever I felt scared, I could ask Jesus to help me. All I needed to say was, “In the name of Jesus, Satan, go away.” 

Just saying the name of Jesus was enough to scare Satan away. He couldn’t touch me or my family if I called on the name of my savior. The enemy would flee, and there was nothing he could do to hurt me. 

So I took their tip and put it into practice. 

For years, whenever I felt that prickling unease wash over me, I would pray: “In the name of Jesus, Satan, go away.” 

These words came from my mouth in all kinds of situations. 

• When I was home alone

• When my eyes and ears played tricks on me as I tried to fall asleep

• When I felt scared

• When I felt self-conscious

• When I was nervous about something like an upcoming test at school

I would compulsively say this prayer over and over again in an attempt to nullify my unease. But I learned quickly that I would say the words, and the fear would persist. If saying it didn’t stop the panic, perhaps it kept the terrors from manifesting. I would lay stricken with terror in my twin-size bed, staring at the pile of laundry in the corner, a hidden beast, ready to pounce. My mouth would repeat the prayer and repeat the prayer and repeat the prayer. 

Eventually, I’d fall asleep and, upon waking, find a harmless heap of laundry on the floor. 

At 26 years old, I was diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder.

I thought it was anxiety for the longest time, and I didn’t identify praying as a compulsion until recently. If you’ve been reading my blog for any amount of time, you know my Christian faith is dear to me, and I never thought prayer could be a bad thing, so I never told anyone about the habit. 

When I was as old as 22, I continued with this compulsion. I lived in an off-campus house with a few other young women my senior year of college, and I never felt safe there. I don’t know if it was because of the location or because one of my roommates had the tendency to leave the door unlocked or open, but I was constantly on edge that entire year. 

I compulsively prayed, yes, but I also checked the lock on my bedroom door and listened to a police scanner app. I’d lay in silence, staring at my bedroom ceiling, listening for unusual sounds coming from downstairs. I Googled crime rates in my area and read through hundreds of Reddit threads on home break-ins. My then-boyfriend-now-husband reassured me that I lived in a relatively safe neighborhood. He even propped his shotgun in the corner of my closet and showed me how to use it, just in case there was an intruder. 

When I moved out of that house and into an apartment with my husband, that obsession faded, but it was replaced with others. Those faded in time and were again replaced with other fears, all based on intrusive thoughts that I gave attention to—I caught them like butterflies and stored them in jars. I examined them from every angle wondering why they decided to flit through my thoughts. Why these butterflies in particular? If I didn’t catch them, they would have floated away, unnoticed. I’d remember they had flown through but be unable to recall anything particular about them. 

Back to prayer. 

At some point, I realized saying a certain prayer wouldn’t protect me from my fears. As my obsessions ebbed and flowed, so did my compulsions, and I realized that saying that prayer didn’t make my fears go away, and it didn’t prevent them from coming true. It also didn’t make the fears more likely to come true if I didn’t say the prayer. My brain understood, at some point, that empty repetitions were just that—empty. 

And it was then I knew there was more to prayer than words. 

Last year, I was asked to join the Prayer Team at my church. The request surprised me because of my complicated relationship with prayer. It had only been recently that God’s healing had begun to take root, and a freedom, a conversation, in prayer that I hadn’t been capable of in the past flourished. Prayer for the sake of spending time with God and talking with him—as a friend, my Lord, the lover of my soul—rather than using him to stamp out my fears. 

While I still struggle with obsessive compulsive disorder, albeit not to the degree I did a year ago, I no longer use prayer as a compulsion. God has delivered me from that and restored my relationship with prayer and with him. 

I still pray when I’m afraid, but I no longer pray in a frantic attempt to escape my fears. I pray when I’m afraid the same way I confided in my parents when I was a child. The way I go to my husband now. To seek comfort and counsel. To build a deeper intimacy by disclosing my deepest vulnerabilities. 

“Look, I am about to do something new; even now it is coming. Do you not see it? Indeed, I will make a way in the wilderness, rivers in the desert.” — Isaiah 43:19 (CSB)