Does God Really Answer Prayer?

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I recently listened to Trevor Noah’s “Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood” on the Audible APP.

As the book’s title indicates, Noah - a comedian who hosts The Daily Show on the Comedy Central TV network - tells a humor-laced but sometimes sad story about growing up in South Africa, which was struggling to shake off the legacy of apartheid.

Throughout the book, Noah exhibits a strong attachment to his mother, a deeply religious woman. In the last chapter, he describes how his mother was shot in the head by her husband, Noah’s stepfather. The bullet entered from behind her skull and exited her face. But his mother lived. In fact, she was out of the hospital in four days and back to work in seven.

Still, as the young Trevor sat in the hospital room after she gained consciousness, he felt anger at God for allowing the shooting to happen. He sat by her bed, holding her hand, crying.

“I was angry at God because all my Mom does is pray…and this is what she gets?”

Health Insurance
Noah was inconsolable, but his Mom insisted that she “wasn’t going to die,” and paraphrasing a psalm, said, “If God is for me, who can be against me?” Jesus, she said, was her “health insurance.”

Noah had by that time made a considerable amount of money as a comedian and had paid many of his mother’s hospital bills.

“But where was your Jesus to pay your hospital bills?” he asked. “I know he didn’t pay your hospital bills.”

“You’re right,” his mother replied. “He didn’t, but he blessed me with a son who did.”

Many people are angry at God, even some who deny God’s existence. Somehow, the shooting was God’s fault, even though it was Noah’s stepfather who pulled the trigger. People blame God for what happens to their loved ones, for natural disasters, for human error and evil-doing and for just about anything that causes stress or sorrow.

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Maybe it’s understandable. We can’t see the big picture. Unlike God, we’re not omniscient. As Paul Simon sings in “Slip Sliding Away,” “God only knows, God makes his plan. The information's unavailable to the mortal man.”

But for everyone who blames God for the bad things that happen there is another who ascribes every relief or recovery to God.    

Fact is, we simply don’t know the extent to which God intervenes in our lives. In one sense, according to the Bible and tradition, God controls everything. As creator and author of life, he/she is the ultimate arbiter, perhaps justifying the commonly-heard saying, “Everything happens for a reason.”

But it’s obvious that God has provided us with freedom, including the freedom to reject or be indifferent to him/her, and has created the laws that govern our physical lives. Can God override those laws? If he’s capable of creating the universe – designing the incredible evolutionary process that resulted in what exists so far - he’s capable of anything we can imagine.

That includes walking on water, changing water into wine and raising someone from the dead. It may also include preventing a loved one, like Trever Noah’s mother, from dying.

Differences of Opinion
But does God continually intervene in our lives? There are obvious differences of opinion. Personally, I think God rarely or never does, although he/she is capable of doing so. Believing that God routinely does so means you have to attribute to God the bad things that happen – failing to intervene when we want him/her to - along with the good, and that doesn’t compute with a loving parent.

We are, in any case, selective when assigning blame or credit to God, tending, I believe, to assign to him/her what we can’t understand.

“So if God doesn’t regularly intervene, why pray?”

First, the question assumes that most of our prayers are prayers of petition: we’re asking God for something, including protection from harm. But, of course, there are also prayers of adoration, gratitude and those seeking forgiveness, and these are kinds of prayer that many of us neglect.

Prayers of petition are OK, of course. Jesus prayed those kinds of prayers. But we just don’t know how they’re answered. Isn’t it possible, however, that from all eternity a certain outcome depends on whether or not we prayed for it?

One thing about prayer is certain: It’s good for us. It bonds us to our God, reminding us that he/she is with us no matter what. Apart from that, I believe God expects us to be adults, use our brains and make the best decisions we can. He promises to be with us in all of them, good and bad.

That should be enough.