Finding God In The RuinsSample

Unanswered Prayers

I could see these bowls in my mind, filled with incense – filled with prayers that had been left before God, piled high and teeming over with our needs. What requests had been made? What desires had been collected in these gold bowls and why hadn’t they been sorted through yet? I wondered who had prayed them and if mine were a part of this collection? I was fascinated at the thought of God collecting and saving our prayers.

I rummaged online and in commentaries. Each resource offered multiple thoughts, but one theory was represented by nearly every source I looked into.

Unanswered prayers.

Many theologians believed the gold bowls were filled with one-sided prayers that had been prayed but left unanswered.

Was this true? Was God collecting our unanswered prayers? I imagined the prayers of millions of people, “save me, deliver me, heal me, love me, fix me, use me, feed me, release me, have me, hold me, fill me, take me, sustain me, liberate me, rescue me, come through for me…

…REDEEM me.”

I would love if I could make some of the positive sayings and scriptures we use as spiritual loopholes actually work. “Everything happens for a reason” is a great rule to live by if your kid loses a piece of candy through the cracks of the bleachers or if your car stalls on the side of the road. It doesn’t work when someone’s biopsy comes back positive. “When God closes a door he opens a window” is perfect for not getting that job you always wanted or for a blind date gone wrong. It doesn’t work for divorce. It doesn’t work for someone’s kid who didn’t stay in rehab. And if someone is standing over their wife’s lifeless body at a funeral, beautiful and powerful words like “all things work together for our good,” are just poison in a pretty pill. Out of context, rules, even real good ones, make God look like Hitler.

Sometimes I feel that God should be going about the whole process differently. I find myself wanting to take over for him – to slide him into the copilot’s seat and let him press the dummy buttons, twist knobs, and flip disconnected switches while I sit in the pilot’s seat and get this thing in the air. There are times I feel that I’d do a better job of it all – that instead of skidding across the runway with our fingers crossed, we’d fly first class, no turbulence, with our own personal flight attendant and have a tour of the cockpit if we wanted. And this is when I’ve often been told that I just need to trust him.

But why…why trust God?

What is it, exactly, that God redeems in this life?