Too Busy to Pray? Lessons from a Thousand Days
When Andy Robinson was told he had incurable, terminal cancer and about a thousand days to live, every excuse he had for not praying went out of the window. Drawing on Acts 6:4 and Luke 5:15–16, Andy challenges us to see that prayer isn't how we get ready for the work. It is the work.

Is prayer the warm-up or the main event?
Most of us tell ourselves we’ll pray when we’ve “cleared the deck”, that we’ll just reduce the to-do list a bit and then we’ll be able to focus more easily. But prayer isn’t an add-on or prelude to the real job of ministry. It is the ministry. In Acts 6:4 the apostles committed themselves to “prayer and then to the ministry of the word”. Prayer came first and Jesus, busier and with a greater mission than we’ll ever have, “often withdrew to lonely places and prayed” (Luke 5:16). It wasn’t a once-a-year retreat, it was His rhythm. So, whatever we’re doing, even for God, we have to ask ourselves the question: in whose strength are we doing it?

Do we pray as if lives depend on it?
For Andy, prayer suddenly became a matter of life and death, and he came to see that it’s the same for the people around us who don’t know Jesus yet. When we invite people to Alpha, we’re not offering them afternoon tea. We’re praying for a life-saving opportunity. Paul’s “unceasing anguish” for his people (Romans 9:2–3) shows us what urgent prayer looks like. Luke tells us that after Jesus prayed, “the power of the Lord was with Him to heal”. Prayer wasn’t a break from His ministry. It was where His ministry came from.

Why keep asking for the big stuff?
Disappointment can kill more prayer lives than busyness ever will. Andy had hope without certainty. As soon as he announced his diagnosis, people began asking, “Do you have faith for healing?” If we believe that faith is “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1), then Andy says he didn’t have assurance of healing. He believed that God could heal him, but he didn’t know that he would be healed. If we define hope as confident expectation, then Andy says he had confident expectation in the God who heals, but assurance, no, not that, but it didn’t stop him praying anyway. Then, in August, his oncology team told him his latest scans showed no active sites of tumour anywhere in his body. He is no longer considered terminal or palliative. Andy has another scan coming up soon, and he’s praying it will be all clear again.

It’s easy to feel like unanswered prayer can cause our faith to falter, but remember the anguish of Gethsemane. Here in that garden, we see the greatest unanswered prayer in history, but it led to the cross, and the cross led to an empty tomb. The greatest unanswered prayer in history became the greatest answer to prayer in history, the restoration of our relationship with God.

Life Application
So this week,

Pray first, before the emails and the to-do list.
Name three people who don’t yet know Jesus. Pray for them with the urgency you’d bring to your own scan results.
Bring one “impossible” request to God, and keep bringing it.

We all have enough time. What's missing is urgency! Whether we're waiting on a diagnosis or simply drowning in a busy diary, the invitation is the same: slip away to pray, and keep asking for the big stuff, because with God there's always the possibility of a "suddenly" moment. Lord, teach us to pray as if it really is the work, because it is…