By Linda Evans Shepherd
When you’re wading through muddy waters, longing for clarity, it can feel like there’s nothing firm to stand on—only murky answers and shifting ground.
You take a step forward, hoping for direction, but instead you slip, sliding farther from the hopes you’ve carried in your heart.
That’s exactly how I felt after turning in the manuscript for the prayer book of my heart. I believed in the message. I knew it could help people.
I even imagined it might become a favorite among readers navigating uncertain seasons.
But I never dreamed the publisher would lay off their entire editorial team and replace them with people who had no connection to my work.
Then came the phone call.
A new staff member, unfamiliar with my previous books, blurted, “Honestly, this book was so bad, you should never write again.” Just like that, all the hope I had poured into the pages seemed to wash away.
The waters weren’t just murky—I had slipped and landed flat on my back. But sometimes, that’s the very position that leads to clarity. Flat on our backs, looking up, we’re finally able to look toward heaven and we’re still enough to listen.
This is the “Help, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” posture of prayer. The very posture that opens our ability to accept new direction from the Lord.
If you’re in a similar place—neck-deep in uncertainty, wondering which direction to go—here are three prayers that helped me navigate my muddy waters.
1. “Lord, help!”
Simple. Raw. Desperate. But that’s often exactly where God meets us.
As Jeremiah 33:3 promises, “Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know.”
When we cry out, God answers—with wisdom, clarity, and peace.
2. “I give this situation to You.”
Because whether we realize it or not, we were never really in control. God’s detours aren’t punishments— they’re protection.
Sometimes He lets us hit a wall, so we won’t fall off a cliff.
3. “Please turn my confusion into clarity, and my disaster into a blessing.”
That was my honest prayer. And God moved. He released me from that contract and led me to a publisher who believed in the book.
That same project—When You Don’t Know What to Pray— became one of their top sellers that season.
To this day, it’s still my best-selling book out of the forty I’ve written.
Yes, when I lost my publisher, I shed tears.
Yes, I spent nights on my knees.
But the journey deepened my faith. It reminded me that God not only meets us in disaster—He walks with us into the resulting blessings as well. So, if you’re standing in muddy waters right now, unsure which way is forward, don’t give up.
Clarity doesn’t always come all at once. But it will come. One prayer at a time.
Linda Evans Shepherd is the publisher of Leading Hearts and the author of Praying through Hard Times from Baker Revel. www.GotToPray.com
