The power of prayer

Do you ever wonder what your life would be like if you got everything you ever wanted? Life doesn’t work that way, right? But just for a second, imagine it does.

How would things have turned out for you? I don’t have to tell you that life is an assortment of all sorts of experiences and outcomes. Some bring us happiness and some bring us sorrow. It makes perfect sense to wonder how our lives could have been better in our mind; it makes sense to wonder what we would change if we could.

What would have happened if our parents had let us eat candy or junk food absolutely anytime we wanted? What would have happened if our moms and dads had let us go to that one unsupervised high school pool party? What if we had gotten into our first college of choice instead of the one we eventually attended? What if the guy or girl we had a crush on a long time ago felt the same way as we did? What if we got hired by the first company we applied to?

It’s impossible to know exactly how our lives would have played out if we had gotten everything we hoped for, if every situation turned out the way we wanted it to. And while it’s easy to imagine how our lives might have been better, it’s just as easy to see how things might have been worse if everything had gone our way.

Maybe we would have had health problems as a child if our parents had given us the ok to eat whatever we wanted. Maybe we would have gotten injured or in trouble had we gone to the pool party? Maybe we would have struggled academically if we had gotten into our first college of choice?

Maybe we would have married the absolute wrong person if that boy or girl from long ago had said yes. Maybe we’d be miserable if we had gotten that job we desperately wanted.

I guess it’s somewhat heartening to think that maybe my life and your life have unfolded exactly as they was supposed to, and that the ways we imagine our lives could have been better are just illusions.

But how do we explain the really big disappointments, the ones that truly break our hearts?

In many ways the experiences of our lives are like three threads woven together. One is God’s will: those things God is actively working to bring about, things that reflect God’s deepest desires for the world he created. The second thread contains the experiences that come about through the choices we and others make.

These choices we and others make can, of course, be aligned with what God wants or can run counter to his will. And the third thread is a kind of catchall for those things that don’t quite fit into the other two. It can be nearly impossible to try to figure out exactly how these three things interact. So what’s a believer to do? Pray anyway.

We will never know the mind of God in that sort of specific, concrete way. After all, we are creatures, and he is not. But we pray anyway. And we trust that he will provide, even if we don’t understand the how or why about it.

Praying and asking and seeking and knocking are signs of faith. We should never abandon them. But there is one thing that God will always provide, no matter what, every time we open our hearts and minds and souls to him.