Nic
Being religious was actually the “cool” thing to do when I was in high school. It wasn’t the guys who never went to church or who never volunteered to give a Bible reading or prayer or lead a song in chapel (since I went to a private high school, founded in an ultra-conservative Protestant denomination) who were desirable to the girls and were popular, but just the opposite. If you were willing to give a whole talk during chapel, a mini-sermon or a devotional message, you were brave. You were strong. You were courageous.
I led many, many devotionals. I led many songs and read numerous verses from the Bible, and I said an uncountable number of prayers. I prayed for peace, I prayed for baseball wins. I prayed for grades and I prayed for strength to abstain from what we were told were sinful practices. I prayed for my health and life and the lives of my friends, and this I believe; that praying is futile and worthless. Those prayers I prayed, and every prayer said by every person before me and every person since was not and is not an active effort to obtain anything, but rather a passive relinquishment of responsibility and a sheep-like resignation of control over our lives.
In the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college, my mom fell quickly and violently sick. She went from flu-like symptoms on Saturday to unconscious in a hospital bed on Monday afternoon, and I can assure you, prayers were said in those thirty or so hours. My father surely prayed, despite not being a deeply religious man. My sister prayed. My grandmothers and grandfather prayed. My friends and preachers and teachers and classmates and fellow church-goers prayed. Well, I say they all prayed. I assume they did, anyway. Isn’t that what they all said you should do when someone needs your help? Of course it is… you pray for them. Anyway, I prayed. I prayed harder than I ever had before, and though I would love to tell you that God Himself came down and saved her, of course that would not be true. My mom died on Monday afternoon. Was it because we didn’t pray hard enough? Maybe we weren’t good enough for God to listen to us. But that’s not true either, of course. A year and a half later, when my dad was sick with cancer, I did not pray once, and he died too.
You see, it took a very personal and very tough situation to shake me into the realization that prayer isn’t helping anyone. It’s not even that it “can’t hurt”. It does hurt. When you pray, you’re simply saying that there’s nothing you can do and you’re throwing your hands up in the air and you’re giving up. Interestingly, people have the perfect explanation for whatever happens after they have prayed. If what they prayed for comes to them, and they get their way, then God has blessed them. But what if what they prayed for doesn’t happen? Well, then it’s, “God works in mysterious ways,” or, “God must have some other purpose for me.” But none of that is true. The fact is, my mother would have died if I had not prayed a single time in my life. And what if both my father and I had done nothing but kneel in prayer for the three months he knew he had carcinoma? He would have died even faster than he did, without the chemotherapy, I can assure you. It took me a long time to realize that it’s not that God hates me, or that I did anything wrong. It’s not that Satan was having a ball torturing me either. It’s just what happened.
The tough part has been realizing that that is OK. I had to realize that I am a better person now, because now I know that I’m not going to give up control. I’m not going to rely on anyone or anything else to strengthen me. My strength is my own, and it’s enough to get me through anything I might encounter or have to go through, and I will never again have to rely on prayers going up into an empty sky to get me through a trying time… this I know.
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