Prayer

When I pray, t’s always hard to say whether I’m actually getting an answer or just making up a response in my head or fabricating some feeling in my gut. Sometimes it probably doesn’t matter because what I assume Heavenly Father would tell me is probably what He would tell me. Does this make sense? Maybe you’ve felt like this before too.

Last week (Friday, Saturday, Sunday) I was praying about a lot of things. I would pray and then try to listen, until I decided I had an answer. But I wasn’t really sure if the answer was coming from me or from Heavenly Father. So I played a little game where I would ask something and then try to come up with a supposed answer from God in my mind. Much to my disappointment and frustration, it worked. I could make myself feel good about whatever response I decided to give myself to the questions I was asking...apparently to myself.

What a horrible feeling, to feel alone...like there really isn’t anyone there, listening, guiding the universe...No one that I can rely on for help...or even worse that we as humans just make stuff up out of necessity...so that we can get over problems and pretend there is more to life when we do dumb things or our babies die or we need to begin again or need a reason to live. Maybe there isn’t a God, and we just invented Jesus and redemption so that we would have a reason to move forward. Maybe while God and Jesus are still good things, they aren’t real.

It’s not incomprehensible to me...it would just suck if it were true.

I need a real Heavenly Father who gives me real answers to my real questions. What good is God a who only lives in my mind and can’t do anything? Such Gods in everyone’s minds would make truth relative, and my religion a silly game.

So while I was praying that night, I told Heavenly Father I needed something real, a real answer I knew was from Him and not made up. It didn’t have to be a sign or anything in particular, I just needed to know my prayers were being heard and answered.

And I did get my prayer answered, in a real way.

I was going to write about exactly what happened here, but I don’t feel like it, and the only reason I wanted to post anything about this was so that I will remember later in my life a time when my prayer was answered, and not with an answer that was just in my head.