Why do I pray?

I am amazed at the things that I have prayed for during my life. It is no wonder that so many of these prayers seem to fall on death ears. As a child I remember praying for God to give me a brother to have as a playmate. My sisters were two and four years older than me, and even though we did our share of playing together I thought it would be cool to have another boy in the household just for me to play with my Hot Wheels and other boy stuff. Just like on live TV and radio shows where they don't push out the broadcast as it is being collected by cameras and microphones instantly, apparently with prayers there is also a time delay in the reply from above. My younger brother was born 12 years after me, so if you take into account that I probably started nagging God for a brother around the age of 4, then we can assume that the celestial time lag in responding to annoying little children is probably around 8 years. As of September 2009, the world population (living humans on Earth) has been estimated by the United States Census Bureau to be 6.782 billion. This actually complicates things because according to their statistics the world population doubled between the year 1959 and 1999. This means that in my own lifetime the number of possible prayer submittals has also probably doubled, making the current response time of God to our pleads probably that more delayed than ever.

I know that it might be silly of me to do the above inference about God and His prayer response time, but sometimes I just can't help myself with numbers and I go on and on in my head trying to figure out what are the probabilities about certain things happening. I told you I that I am a nerd at heart. Well, as any believer might tell you, God is almighty and there is no such thing as "time" in Heaven. The part of my brain that has accepted God in my life buys this "for God time does not exist" concept, and the other part of my brain that deals with scientific fact says "wow, that would be pretty cool indeed!" I don't want to get too technical and lose my esteemed readers, but you should know that in physics the only mathematical process that does not allow time to go both forward and backwards are the Laws of Thermodynamics and this is because of a measure called entropy. All the fancy words just tell us that things tend to get disorganized in nature and not the other way around. You can take wood, apply heat, burn it, and it will stop being wood and become heat, ashes, and all the other gases that were expelled when it was burned. On the other hand, we just cannot take the leftover materials and turn them back into wood because of entropy. Hence, time only goes forward in that single place of physics. Everywhere else the equations work the same one way or the other meaning that nothing else prevents things from happening backwards in time, making time in the same way that it is to God, meaningless.

Back on the subject of prayers being answered. In later years, while I was a kid in school, I would pray for all sorts of crazy things. "God, please don't let me flunk my math test...God, please don't let mom find out I flunked my math test...God, please make that hurricane turn our way so there won't have school for a week...God, please make it stop raining so I can go out and play...God, please make the blond girl in my Biology class like me...God, please make the brunette girl in Geometry class like me." Do you see a trend happening here? I could go on and on with a huge list of amazingly confusing requests for the submittal and approval of the Almighty above. It was no wonder that so many of my prayers went unanswered, they almost always cancelled themselves out!

Later on in life ,during my college years, I started to narrow down my submittals to God. Every once in a while I would through in the typical "Help me Jesus" on something totally ungodly, but on the greater volume of my requests I began to understand that much of what I would used to ask for was more on my side of the court than on His to resolve. If I wanted to get a good grade I needed to study harder, and if I did not want to get rained on I needed to check out the forecast before heading out the door. Us guys will probably still pray at any age for the cute girl figuring that a little heavenly intervention just can't hurt our chances. It is no wonder that God has opted to ignore time. If it were up to us we'd leave everything to Him and just lay back and let it all happen on its own. When you hear the expression "Leave it in God's hands," I think this probably means after you have done your part to make it happen. After all, you can't win the lottery if you don't go out and buy the ticket, right?

A short while back I was introduced to a very enlightening book titled "The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom" by Don Miguel Ruiz. If you have never read it, I highly recommend it. In this amazingly short book the author manages to bring into our modern world the wisdom of the ancient Toltec civilization. He proposes four simple agreements that you should make with yourself in order to have a better life:

1. Be Impeccable With Your Word.


2. Don't Take Anything Personally.


3. Don't Make Assumptions.


4. Always Do Your Best.

Just because they are simple in nature it does not mean that they are easy to implement. However, I have discovered that just making a daily effort to improve my personal application of the four agreements in my life has made a very big difference in how I see everything around me. I had already somewhat mastered through life's lessons agreements one and four. You probably can already tell that I strive to be impeccable with my word when I write here for you, by telling you what I really think and feel in my posts. This is already part of who I am, it is embedded into my way of thinking and communicating. Also, I learned that nothing is worth doing unless you at least do your best. This way if it works out, great, if not then there are very little regrets afterwards. Now, not taking things personally and not making assumptions, those two have been really hard for me to integrate into my everyday life. I do confess though that the little changes that I have made to be true to agreements two and three have already made an immense impact in my life. Read the book, you'll like it.

Nothing has made a greater improvement in my narrowing down silly prayer requests than my already implemented "always do my best" agreement. As time has taken my once black hair and turned it mostly into gray, I have little by little learned enough lessons to allow me to get my prayers done before sunrise every night. In fact I have learned that when I am having a particularly rough day it only makes sense to spend my entire day in a somewhat state of prayer to keep things going between God and I. Instead of waking up and doing a morning prayer, more often than not I find myself having a conversation with him throughout my entire day. If on my way out I have a tough time with my son, instead of asking God to fix him, I pray for Him to bless my son and take care of him. If when I get to work I find the load of work to be too much, instead of praying for it to go away, I pray for Him to give me what it takes to finish what needs to be done. I'll spend at least 20 to 25 minutes on the phone with mom and when I am finally in the parking lot at work, instead of leaving my prayer for that night, I sit in my car seat for just a few seconds thanking God for allowing her to still be in my life.

All this prayer talk might lead you to believe that I am a very religious person when in fact this is not so. If you walked up to me and started talking about religion I will most likely just listen politely and very seldom add to your conversation. If you are an atheist or agnostic, I find nothing wrong with your choice to be one and I am definitely not the good disciple that will try to bring the Word of God to convert you. Instead I will add you to my list of people that God should take care and bless even more in order for you to be happy just the way you are in life. I sometimes feel guilt when confronted with questions about how people suffer so much in this world regardless of God's power. I don't have an answer to this kind of confrontation and I personally think that nobody has one. As much as I have been raised to be Catholic, I left my guilt lessons a long time ago. I do not believe that God punishes, or rewards. I have seen too much pain in my friends that have lost their children and loved ones to unexplainable diseases and accidents. How could a loving God want that to happen to anyone? What lesson is there to be learned about that kind of pain that could actually make sense to anyone? In my opinion, none. In my defiance I have found myself asking God that very same question that you too have asked Him. Why God, tell me why it is that we need to feel all this heartbreaking pain during our lifetime? Earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis, air and car accidents, suicides, homicides, addictions, diseases, and so much more ranks high on the list of questionable divine intervention. As far as I can tell, all of these have been here one way or another so life is a playground for events that are mostly out of our control. Yet some of us that are not religious still choose to believe. I for one am one of them.

I have my reasons to believe in God, and lot of you probably do too. If I was a minister or priest I would probably call it faith. To these closer than me to God individuals, the answer to all of the unknown is faith. To me, I just call it need. I need to believe that there is something else out there that will eventually hear my calls for help. I need to have hope that things will get better. I need to accept my life as it is in order to still be happy and make others around me happy too. I don't think that I have a choice. This is one of the reasons I respect people that do not believe in God. I think that it is much harder to not believe than it is to do so. How can you live day by day thinking that when you die it all ends? That takes guts. I must be a coward taking the easy way out and believing that one day I will be part of something greater than all that is part of my life today. In fact God is so real to me that sometimes instead of finding myself in a constant state of prayer, I find myself in a constant state of arguments with Him. In anger because of my frustration with my son's condition I sometimes yell at Him and challenge God to do something about it, to fix him, to make it right! Absolutely no guilt in my heart is generated after I have these confrontations with God. I figure if God can't take the heat, how does He expect me to be able to take it myself. So we dish it out on each other in an emotional outburst of anger, pain, and frustration. By the end of it all I find myself left with one single emotion in my heart. After I have expended all my energy telling Him how I feel one simple feeling prevails that brings me back to my emotional center. Love, this is what it all boils down to. I love Him, He loves me, and then we forgive each other and start all over again walking down this road together. It is because of how much He loves me that I am able to love my son so much and not only endure, but hopefully also prevail. This is the same reason that most of you have prevailed after you have lost someone precious to you in your lives. You might think that it is because of your faith, but I am here to tell you that I am completely sure it is because of your love. I won't go down that road to spell it all out for you for one good reason, I know that if you dig deep inside your heart you will understand what I mean. If by any chance you go in there and can't find the answer on your own, welcome to my world and enjoy the ride. There is still a lot more to learn.

Dad