	Bob Hostetler > Writing

Unanswered Prayers

by Bob Hostetler

There's a striking scene in the latest Jim Carrey movie, Bruce Almighty (now showing at Showplace 8 in Hamilton). The lead character, Bruce, having been given divine powers in a friendly showdown with God himself (played by Morgan Freeman), discovers an unexpected side-effect: prayer.

When he starts hearing people's prayers at all hours of the day and night, he decides something must be done. After several abortive--and comical-- attempts, he routes the prayers (hundreds of thousands of them) to his email. And answers them all. Indiscriminately. With a yes.

It's a nice thought. But if our every prayer were answered, it would certainly lead to some unpleasant results (as the movie depicts quite well). Every high school and college student would ace every test (turning them all into valedictorians!). Opposing sports teams would probably end every game in a tie. Red lights along busy city streets would turn green--in every direction!--creating chaos and collisions. In fact, if we could momentarily see things from God's perspective--instead of through our own myopic, often selfish, eyes--we would certainly be as grateful for the prayers God doesn't answer as for the ones he does. Perhaps even when the results seem unspeakably cruel and tragic, as happened years ago when my parents announced we were moving.

I was thirteen years old, and had lived in the same house since I was an infant. The news of our impending move from Cincinnati to St. Louis, over three hundred miles away, upset and angered me. Mom and Dad dutifully explained the advantages of a new job for my father, a new home for us, and the fact that we would be much closer to my mother's parents and sister (who lived in St. Louis). I wasn't convinced; I couldn't understand why my parents--or God, for that matter--would do such a thing to me. I prayed for him to change their minds and plans. We moved anyway.

I was bitter. Morose. Incensed. But I didn't quite know everything. I didn't know (none of us did when we moved) that my mother had cancer. She underwent invasive surgery, and radical treatments, but the disease was never checked, much less reversed. She died fifteen months after the move.

Three months later, my father and I packed all our possessions into a rented truck and moved back to Cincinnati. As I watched the Gateway Arch, St. Louis's distinctive landmark, shrink in the moving van's side mirror, I reflected on my unanswered prayers.

Even in my still raging grief, I realized that God had transplanted my family for a brief fifteen months to the only place on earth where my mother could have enjoyed the daily attention of her parents and sisters as she prepared for the day when cancer would claim her body and God would claim her soul.

That experience taught me, as a teenager, that I'm not quite wise enough to get all my prayers answered. It taught me that God still knows more than me. It taught me that I shouldn't even want all "yes" answers to my prayers.

And it taught me--whatever I'm praying for--to be thankful also for unanswered prayers. Like Jim Carrey's character in Bruce Almighty, I've come to recognize the wisdom of praying according to God's will and submitting every request to his all-knowing providential care.because I would much rather trust his wisdom than my own.

This article appeared in the June 6, 2003 edition of the Hamilton Journal-News.

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