Should Christians manifest? It’s a question that has circulated through the minds and social media feeds of Millennials and Gen Z, especially since the pandemic. And while some might answer with a clean “yes” or “no,” I think the fuller picture takes some intellectual engagement that I believe is deeply worthy of our time and attention. So if you like complex conversations rather than oversimplified answers, I invite you to read on.
For my thirtieth birthday, I accomplished a feat very few even dare to attempt:
I walked into a packed Chicago restaurant with a party of four during the Saturday-night dinner rush…and secured a table.
Not that I didn’t try to get a reservation. I had called twice, only to be told that every reservation for the night had already been claimed… “but you’re welcome to show up as a walk-in.”
Did I dare?
Typically, I’d weigh the slim odds and decide to settle for second best. But tonight was not that night. Tonight, I wondered if maybe it could all work out.
Some might call it manifestation or positive thinking. I call it prayerful partnership.
My Optimistic Thinking Origin: The Eldest Daughter of a Realist
Growing up, my dad was always a realist. He was the safety guy, the planner, the one who thought of everything that could go wrong and prepared for every variable so it wouldn’t. He anticipated liabilities and found solutions. So naturally, as his only daughter raised on Disney magic and Lisa Frank, I saw him as a raging pessimist. I always told him that if I was a glass-half-full kinda gal, he was a “glass shattered on the floor” kinda guy. And yet, his knack for creating solutions to problems that hadn’t arrived yet still found its way into my bones.
Years later, I saw his forethought and preparedness less as pessimism and more as chaos management. He prepared for things to go wrong so that they didn’t. And I started to follow suit. I scanned every situation for all the variables no one had thought of yet. I over-packed for every trip so I’d have everything I needed for every “what if” that could arise. I chronically saved my money so I’d never run out. I kept all my kinda-fitting clothes so that when I needed to craft a themed outfit, I always had just the piece to pull the look together—even if I hadn’t worn that shirt in three years. AND when I might show up at a packed restaurant with no available tables, I would rather choose the option I knew had seats open.
Until the day that I took an uncharacteristic risk…and it worked. But why did it work? Was I manifesting through positive thinking? Did I have “lucky girl syndrome”? Or was there something—or Someone—else at play?
Does Manifesting Work? Where Positive Thinking Falls Short
Dozens of social media trends have been shouting the benefits of manifestation and positive thinking lately. There’s the “lucky girl syndrome” trend encouraging girls to declare “everything works out for me” and speak their preferred future into existence through manifestation. Manifestation trends promise you can speak your desires into the world, and they will come true. Just manifest it! There are even faith-based prosperity-gospel posts, stemming from a similar ideology and similar origins as manifestation, saying that we can and should command the world’s chaos to fall in line with the blessings God wants to give us. And while naming your desires and taking action toward them has real psychological benefits, the practices of manifestation and positive thinking has limits.
These trends not only center your own will, but also subtly imply that if your desire doesn’t come to fruition, it’s because you didn’t want it enough, say it enough, or try hard enough. It’s a really sparkly version of a works-based Gospel.
If you manifest and it comes to fruition, it’s because of what you did to make your own dream come true.
If you claim that everything works out for you, and then it does, you attribute it to your mindset.
If you name and claim a blessing based on your own desires, then you are centering your life around your own will in a spiritually glamorous way.
But the pendulum doesn’t just swing toward wishful thinking. For a lot of us, especially those of us who grew up wary of centering on our own will, it can just as easily swing the other way: Repressive thinking. Self-denial. Desire-erasure. If we fear self-aggrandizing, we often swing the pendulum to making ourselves smaller. Rather than trying to manifest our hopes, we deny them. By minimizing our wishes, we convince ourselves we’re centering on God’s will, when really we’re just avoiding naming what we want at all, because it feels safer than risking being selfish or prideful…or risking the disappointment of unanswered prayers.
But the opposite of manifestation is NOT saying, “whatever you want, God, I don’t care.”
The opposite of self-centered thinking, positive or repressive, is partnering with God. And partnership requires me to know my desires and move toward them, while staying humble enough to pivot if God leads me to greener pastures than I planned.
So if manifestation practices and positive thinking ask too much of me, and repressive thinking asks me to disappear, what’s left? Partnership.
Which is different than a faith-based rebrand of “Christian manifestation.” And also entirely different than how many people think of “denying yourself.” And here’s why it beats both of these methods:
1. Positive thinking says mind over matter. Prayerful partnership says matter matters.
Both self-actualization and self-abandonment are asking me to pretend. Self-actualization asks me to look at what’s actually happening (the no, the closed door) and believe it isn’t true, like if I just think positively enough, I can override it.
Self-abandonment asks me to look at my own desires—the part of me that actually cares how this turns out—and pretend that part isn’t real either, because surely a good Christian doesn’t need their desires to matter that much. Two totally different postures, but they’re both asking me to look away from something true. One asks me to look away from the reality outside me. The other asks me to look away from the reality inside me.
Partnership thinking has never once asked that of me. It lets the hard thing stay hard. It lets the no stay a no. It lets me remain a person who has desires.
I can be fully grounded in both the reality in front of me and the reality inside of me, because a good and gracious God is present to both. Scripture tells me He wants to give me the desires of my heart. He knows what I want before I even say it out loud. And He’s actively working for my good, while also being wise enough to steer me toward greener pastures when what I want would harm me.
And He’s just as present in the hard circumstance itself. He doesn’t hand me something hard and tell me to grit my teeth and accept it. Sometimes He moves through it. Sometimes He moves it entirely.
I serve a Savior who makes impossible and improbable things happen all the time, not because of the power of positive thinking, but because of the power of God. And instead of white-knuckling myself into goodness, I can rest in the truth that His goodness will follow me all the days of my life.
So rather than always trying harder for better outcomes (the unspoken logical end of manifestation and self-improvement culture), I can just partner with Him and rejoice when He brings good things my way. This means neither the closed door in front of me nor the desires within me have the final say. He does. And that is truly incredible news.
That’s what makes partnership thinking better than positive thinking or repressive thinking. Neither of the latter two ever asks less of me than total control—whether that’s controlling my mindset until reality bends or controlling my own desires until they disappear. Partnership thinking asks something else of me entirely. It asks me to hope, actually hope, in a God who’s already working on my behalf, and to walk forward excitedly with Him rather than white-knuckling the outcome by myself.
2. Positive thinking is a theoretical escape from a lived reality. Partnership thinking is a theological encounter you can inhabit.
Positive thinking only works in theory. The principles of manifestation (law of attraction, law of assumption, etc.) ask me to live as if I’ve already got the outcome I want, instead of the reality I’m actually living within. It requires me to suspend my imagination in anticipation of a different outcome, and then puts that outcome on my shoulders to manifest into existence.
In many ways, repressive thinking works the same way as manifestation, just in reverse. It asks me to live as if I never wanted the outcome at all. It asks me to suspend my own desires until I am so disconnected from them that I am unattached to the outcome as well.
Both postures ask me to move out of my actual life and into a hypothetical one, whether that hypothetical is better than reality or safer than reality.
And what’s deceptive about this suspension of reality is that it looks awfully similar to faith on the outside. From the outside looking in, there is very little distinguishable difference between suspending reality for the purposes of manifestation and suspending reality on the basis of faith. Faith, after all, as Hebrews tells us, is “the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not yet seen.”
So here are the contrasts between faith and positive thinking:
Faith asks us to posture ourselves toward a different reality, not based on our own desires or mindset, but on the basis that God’s power determines the final outcome by a greater measure than whatever tangible, observable data points are currently in sight.
Positive thinking/manifestation says I can change the outcome through enough belief. Faith says that I believe the data points in front of me don’t tell the full story. Faith isn’t saying the picture in front of me can be reshaped by positivity, but that I see dimly what God sees fully, and when He steps in to illuminate the full picture, the outcome is subject to what was always true. Therefore, neither my faith in God’s power nor the hope I’ve placed in the future He is leading me toward requires perfect vision or perfect belief.
Partnership thinking doesn’t ask me to inhabit a hypothetical. It doesn’t require minimizing the data points in front of me or escaping my own lived reality. Instead, it offers a theological framework that I can live from within. A belief in what I’ve already been told is true of me, of the world, and of the God I follow. It is a constant broadening, expanding, and deepening.
As I learn to inhabit the theology I hold, I learn to hope in a new way, to rest in a deeper way, and to experience my life in a more vibrant way. In contrast, the type of positive thinking we’re discussing only works in theory. That theory only holds up if the outcome goes my way. But theology, on the other hand, gives me language for the outcome I am led into, even as it holds more colors than I have names for and more options than I had imagined.
Partnership gives me a way to encounter the closed doors differently. Not as a ‘no’ I must overcome through the power of positive thinking, but as a belief that goodness will be hard to miss even if this closed door wasn’t the entryway to it. I don’t have to pretend I already got the restaurant table, and I don’t have to pretend I never wanted one. I get to remain present in the waiting, trusting a God who is present with me in it.
3. Positive thinking will eventually burn you out. Partnership thinking will light your fire.
Positive thinking is exhausting because it puts the whole outcome on me. If I didn’t manifest hard enough, believe hard enough, speak it into existence loud enough, then it’s either my fault it didn’t happen or it was the plan of an impersonal “universe.” And while “the universe has better things ahead” may be a comfort to those who feel disappointed after failed manifestation attempts, it is a conflict for those who know the name of the One they worship, and who know that He knows their name. An impersonal universe cannot fight for your good. A personal God can, and does.
Repressive thinking, or self-abandonment, is exhausting in a subtler way. It takes the same amount of effort to convince myself I don’t want something as it does to convince myself I already have it. Pretending not to care is still a full-time job. Both require constant maintenance. Constant self-management. Constant monitoring and minimization of my own thoughts and desires. None of which let me rest.
On the contrary, partnership thinking doesn’t run on my effort, which is exactly why the hope it produces doesn’t run out. I’m not the one holding the outcome together. I’m not the one keeping my desires alive or keeping them silent. I get to want things and trust God with them at the same time.
This is the only combination that doesn’t cost me anything to sustain.
It’s a completely different fuel source. The mental effort of manifestation and positive thinking burns whatever I have left at the end of the day. And repressive thinking burns me out from all the energy I’m using trying not to hope at all. But partnership thinking runs on the promise of Isaiah 40:31:
“but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.”
I still remember the day this verse came to life for me. I had just graduated college, and I was more burnt out than I’d ever been. But one day, I sat in the grass and looked up to see a hawk soaring in the clear blue sky. The bird went minutes without flapping its wings at all. It was just soaring on the breeze itself, floating through the sky with no effort at all. And that’s when the promise of this verse hit me. Some birds might tire themselves out flapping tirelessly, going against the wind’s current. But this bird had learned to stop flapping altogether and let the breeze carry him.
That’s the promise God gives to us. He tells us to come to Him when we feel weary and heavy laden, and not only will He give us rest, but when we seek first the Kingdom of God, everything else will follow. When we delight ourselves in Him, He will give us the desires of our hearts. We won’t have to flap our wings and tire ourselves out trying to manifest our hopes into reality, and we won’t have to try so hard to flap against the current of our own desires—we simply must prioritize Partnership with the wind of the Holy Spirit.
Be careful because whatever momentum you build, you have to sustain. But any momentum the Spirit of God builds within your life, He will sustain.
In John 15:15, Jesus says, “I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.”
That’s the magic of prayerful partnership with God.
Partnership thinking gives you both agency and freedom. Agency to voice your desires and wishes and hopes and timelines and plans and brainstorms to the big Guy, and freedom from having to independently come up with the resources or strategies or power or production level to make it happen.
Agency to be a collaborative part of the process and freedom from running a God-level operation as a human-sized one-man-band…because that sounds like a plot to a tragic comedy that only ends in shambles.
Instead, Philippians 4:6-7 tells us, “Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”
Agency and freedom. Agency to submit your requests to the big Guy. Freedom from worry. Transcending peace.
It’s a type of self-denial that doesn’t require disappearance or desire-erasure. It’s a surrender that lets us let go, freeing us from the compulsion to overwork ourselves into optimized outcomes, and instead frees us to rest.
This passage goes on to advocate for its own biblical alternative to positive thinking (vs. 8-9):
“Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me (Paul), or seen in me—put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you.”
And he later, in verses 11-13, gives us proof that the result of this biblical version of positive thinking leads to rest and contentment (and provision):
“I am not saying this because I am in need, for I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do all this through him who gives me strength.”
And later in verses 18 and 20 he says, “I have more than enough. I am amply supplied …And my God will meet all your needs according to the riches of his glory in Christ Jesus.”
Does it promise every wish or desire will be fulfilled? No. God’s not a vending machine or a genie. But this passage does show that when we stop tiring ourselves out flapping our wings and instead focus on the things of God, actively presenting our requests to Him and partnering with the God of peace, then we, too, can proclaim, “I have more than enough.”
Isn’t it funny, then, that many of us look at this passage as some sort of holiness checklist we must work towards (expending effort to think of more positive things) or self-denial ritual (making our anxiety go away and instead praying harder) rather than an invitation into Partnership with God?
But the answer is right there—when we partner with God in our thoughts, our desires, and all their outcomes—the natural fruit of this posture is peace and provision.
So what does that method give us that our other man-made methods don’t? Say it with me now: agency and freedom.
I don’t know about you, but as sparkly as it is, manifestation feels kinda dim compared to partnering with a personal God who is present to all our needs and promises to provide for them. And all of the ways we twist the biblical call to surrender into some sort of self-repressive ritual that leads to a never-ending quest toward self-erasure definitely fall flat when compared to the simplicity of bringing our requests to God and trusting that in every “yes” and “no” we receive, His goodness and mercy will relentlessly chase after us, through no effort of our own.
That’s the kind of positivity I can get behind!
Rather than Christian Manifestation: Partnership with God
So, let’s land this highly abstract, philosophical study of desires and our roles in fulfilling them back in my birthday wish coming true.
As my family walked into the restaurant and checked in with the hostess, she told us—to our surprise at there being a table at all—that they’d have one ready for us in fifteen minutes. Which, to my delight, gave us just enough time to walk two blocks to one of my favorite spots in Chicago: the riverwalk.
And barring the feelings of my poor mother, who was freezing because she didn’t have a warm enough coat on for the frigid winter breeze in the Windy City, that walk was the cherry on top to remind me all I had to do was rest my wings on the wind God blew my way…even if it was a little chilly.
After a quick walk by the river, we walked right back into the restaurant, and the hostess walked us right back to our table. I couldn’t stop saying, “this is perfect!” The vibe was exactly what I’d hoped for—moody, vintage, vibey, mature—all the things I wanted to celebrate my thirtieth birthday. I ordered a sweet cocktail and my latest hyperfixation meal, truly one of my heart’s greatest delights as of late: a really good salmon Caesar salad. And when the waitress brought over a birthday ice cream with a long golden candle for me to blow out, I really had very little more to wish for because my birthday wish had come true.
Some might call it luck. Some might call it positive thinking. Some might say I manifested it. But I would dare to call it one of those moments when my frantic interstate prayers intermingled with the infinite power and immeasurable love of God and somehow, impossibly produced an outcome that made me irrefutably and incandescently happy on my milestone birthday.
Which is so, SO much better than wishing it away or wishing it into being. Instead, it was a birthday present from a God who delights in giving good gifts.
