The Gift.

So in my last post, I described how when I pray for stuff, it seems to work because I believe what I'm praying, but the thing about all that is it scares me. The stuff of my prayers keeps happening, and not in the horoscopey, vague, "maybe this is the answer" way, but through very explicit and clear means. And I've been told by a few Christians that it's a gift, and they tend to start making me use it. :D

But for a girl who grew up in such a conditionally loving environment, where everything had an equal and opposite reaction, this "gift" scares me.

What does it depend on? Why do my prayers get answered? Why me? What makes me different? What if whatever it is changes somehow and the prayers stop getting answered? What if people start to rely on me for prayer and my gift is gone? What then? How will I know when it is gone?

When I first started praying, I was worried about praying wrong. Maybe worried is not the word. Terrified.

Last winter, I thought I was broke (I really had no idea what was to come) and so I prayed that God might provide me whatever I needed that day, and every day, I kept getting it. But then I was betrayed by the person I thought I loved, and I remember telling him after I'd lost him, "All this time, I was praying for food and I forgot to pray to keep you."

Terrified.

But I kind of believe that if your heart is really into prayer, you do get moved by the Holy Spirit a little. I didn't pray to keep him because I was listening to God. I was feeling God. And we all know that particular person was not meant to, say, marry me and betray me over and over until my soul gave up entirely. We know that now. But back then, I was devastated because I thought I must have prayed wrong.

Even earlier than that, I needed a prayer mediator. I didn't feel God, and so I asked this person who would betray me to pray for my people because in my head at the time, before I really started learning, he had a bond with God that I didn't. Turns out he didn't either, but that's another story for another day.

But like the widow who bothers the judge over and over and over in The Parable of the Persistent Widow in Luke 18, so were my prayers this spring when I was broken. Please God, help me to not feel so nauseous all the time. Please God, open this pastor's heart. Please God, make my betrayer feel what he did to me. Those were my three basic things on my prayer list that got me through the worst time I can remember ever having. I couldn't eat because I felt so taken advantage of and I couldn't imagine living in a world where my betrayer would not understand the gravity of what he did to me. And the pastor, well, I just cared about him, even though he couldn't really care less about me. He led a congregation down south and he was one of the first pastors I'd ever listened to online, and some of his message was interlaced with hate, and my betrayer grew up in that church. So I prayed and I prayed and I prayed, every night. Every moment of peace, I would pray.

And then shortly after my birthday trip down to my favorite church, I was home and decided to look up that church where the pastor I prayed for preached. I was so far behind in the sermons, so I just picked my birthday sermon. And this pastor was all powerfully evangelical and never afraid to proclaim the gospel but also maybe throw in a couple of threats of hell in there with his voice on "full scare mode"- he is a passionate preacher.

And so he was in this sermon, and about three quarters of the way through, he just broke down. He said he was just doing the best he could, and people may think he's arrogant, but he's doing all he can for the kingdom of God in the only ways he knows how. He talked about how hard it was to be away from his family, but that this was where God called him to be and so he went. He broke. This pastor, whose heart I'd been praying for for months and months, suddenly shattered. He suddenly became humble and human and open. On my birthday. Just like that.

It was humbling to me also. I wrote to him and shared my awe for God and for the way He'd answered my prayers for this pastor.

By then, my prayers had already changed. My list got longer and became far less about survival and more about helping those around me and glorifying God in the process. But stuff kept happening.

One night, a friend's small dog got hit by a car. She was devastated and preliminary xrays showed the dog was just shattered. His hips, his jaw- he was just a broken little guy. So I prayed for him that night, as he lay in the doggy ER, waiting for the morning staff to come in to run more comprehensive tests on him. The next day, the new xrays showed he hadn't had any breaks at all. Within a couple of days, he was running around again. And while the first instinct in reaction to that is either disbelief or awe, for me, it was kind of intertwined with a panic.

What would the equal and opposite reaction be?

There had to be one. Right? It scares me still. For every prayer that is answered, I somehow feel like something terrible has to happen.

And so I neglected my list. I started to resent it even more because I'd look at it and realize that one by one, I was losing the people on that list. They'd get what I was praying for, but they wouldn't be in my life anymore either. It kind of bothered me to pray for people who had either shut me down or just walked out on me, just because it kept happening. Maybe that was the other shoe dropping, I thought. Maybe they get what I pray for, but in turn, I lose them?

But all that implies that there is a balance of good and evil in God as there is in the world. Well, we'd like to think there's a balance in the world, but I'm not so sure. But in God? There's no turning in God- He won't "turn" evil suddenly. God doesn't give so He can take away. That's not a loving God at all.

What if the only condition in which God gives is that whatever He gives has to glorify Him? What if what you pray for comes true only because it glorifies God in the clearest way possible?

What if what you pray for only happens because you become a vessel of glorification for others?

When I drive home from the country late at night at peak roadkill hour, I always ask God to take care of His animals. "Please God, take care of Your animals," I ask over and over, whenever it occurs to me. And then I always have this internal dialog wherein I decide that even if I hit something, God is still taking care of his animals in a way that I just don't understand yet. And I know if any atheists are reading this, they'd think that's absurd. "What kind of God would put an animal under your tires and have it be a good thing?" But the point is not that He would or not; the point is that if it did happen, my faith would not be shaken. My faith in God does not depend on my requests being answered in the way I expect, but instead on a trust in God and a trust that He will always do what is best and right, even if it might not seem that way at first.

Do I pray to save the animals, to save my car from potential damage, or do I pray because God is good? Because God is good, and if He can show us that good to draw us closer to Him, He will. He always will.

And yet, the way my prayers are answered scares me. Like I said in my post earlier, I really do have to try to learn the good side of God, the loving and gracious side, the side that doesn't need me to constantly suffer, and actually does want me to be ok, so long as it glorifies Him and draws me closer to Him.

Maybe for a girl like me, who is so adapted to conditional love, that's the condition- that there are no conditions at all. Maybe that's something I have to learn to His glory.

Maybe.

But in the meantime, it still terrifies me.