The Prayer of Jabez

The Prayer of Jabez Elizabeth Keller, RN-C, MSN, FNP

Once upon a time according to the Old Testament book of Chronicles, there was a man named "Pain". In Hebrew, that is "Jabez". I suppose the Latin equivalent is Dolores, but that is based on the longer name "Maria de Dolores", "Our Lady of Sorrows". Jabez received his name because his mother experienced a very difficult time giving birth to him: "and his mother called his name Jabez, 'because I bore him in pain"'. Now, I know most mothers consider their children to be pains at least occasionally, but to be actually named a pain is something else.

In a brief and delightful little text, Bruce Wilkinson, a Christian minister, elaborates on the life of Jabez and the prayer he used to save himself from a life of misery. In The Prayer of Jabez Wilkinson invites his readers to pray this daring prayer because he believes it contains the key to an extraordinary life of blessings. I am inclined to agree with him, so I am going to share this simple prayer with you now:


The public response to Wilkinson's book has been phenomenal. It is number 1 on the New York Times' list of best-sellers in the area of Advice & How-to" and Time

magazine recently ran a feature article on it entitled "A Prayer with Wings" in their April 23,2001 issue.

What gives? As Wilkinson explains, the four lines in this prayer break with four major mindsets that often trap people in pain. The fIrst line is a direct, unabashed request to win the $10, 000,000 spiritua110ttery, no ticket necessary. To be blessed "indeed" means to be mega-blessed, super blessed, abundantly, outrageously, unreasonably, miraculously blessed.

The mindset it breaks is the notion that we should only ask for reasonable blessings, humble, appropriate things. This is because God surely only meant us to have what we already have, and maybe a little more, if we ask politely. We would not want to seem presumptious, audacious, selfIsh in daring to ask for more than that. Or would we? Can we think of spiritual blessings as a huge ocean, endless in capacity, just waiting to be poured into us? Can we realize that when we bless and praise and appreciate as much as we possibly can in our lives we are opening ourselves to receive those blessings? The well-recognized spiritual principle of karma is that as we give, so we receive. How dedicated can we be to endlessly bless to receive endless blessings?

The second line asks for more "territory", more room, more ability to contain the endless blessings that await us. If we approach this ocean with a small sand bucket in our hands, we can only carry away with us what that bucket will hold. Ifwe back a tanker truck up to the ocean edge and "fIll 'er up", we have that many more blessings at our disposal. This is a request to "grow me up, make me bigger". Ifwe are tubes or channels for the flow of divine power in our lives, how much we flow out depends on how big our tube is.