by K Scappace

Created on: April 05, 2009

The Divine answers all prayers. We may not like the answer; then we say it was unanswered. Truly though, it was, the answer was no.

Prayers are powerful things. In prayer, we open our hearts and souls to the Divine. We beg for aid to either attain something or achieve a goal. The Divine sees much more than our own involvement though. He sees the involvement of everyone and makes its decision based on what benefits everyone, not just the person praying.

More than this though, the Divine will never just give us our prayer. He will arrange for us to reach it on our own. For instance, we often pray for world peace. The Divine answers our prayer by giving us the opportunity to understand what we pray for and choose a way to achieve it. However, being human, we say our prayer is unanswered rather than accept responsibility for our failure. The Divine sent storms, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and tsunamis to give us ways to help one another and work together in peace. We failed to grasp the opportunity.

We have free will. Of all the beings in the world, we are the only ones with it. A lion cannot go against its nature and become a vegetarian and an angel cannot veer from his task for his own purposes. Only we can make those choices. This is the very reason the Divine must often refuse our petition when we pray. He cannot get rid of AIDS for us, even though he too weeps when people die from it. He did not create it, we did. To get rid of it for us would tamper with our free will. When we pray for an end to AIDS, he offers us a chance to find a cure and to share it with the world. We are the ones who find treatments and offer them only to certain people.

Often young people will say, "If there really is a God, how can he allow starvation, war, and disease?" The answer to this question is, "How can we?"

How can create we wars, hoard food, and withhold medical treatment for pay? How can we fail to share our bounty with our neighbors and then harbor hate in our hearts when they choose violent acts to get what they need? How can we choose violence to get attention when our neighbors are suffering in silence and we fail to see? We must learn to share our blessings as well as our burdens before we can achieve the yes' we pray for.

Every prayer is answered even when the answer is no. It is our task to accept the answer. When we understand that to grant our prayer means the Divine must seize our free will, we must welcome the chance to achieve our goal ourselves.

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