Whatever god you pray to, in whatever form, have you ever felt as though your prayer was undeniably answered?
Please share your experience.
(Full disclosure, I am atheist, but can believe that prayer does something for believers. I ask this from a place of pure curiosity, and adamantly not intending any disrespect)
I have two.
The first involved my mom. She had a heart bypass and was in very critical condition. The doctor told us that she would probably not survive. So I walked to the nearest Catholic church and prayed and prayed and cried and lit a candle. Two days later mom was improving. She went on to live for many more years.
The second involved my baby sister. She too was in critical condition and we had been told to expect the worse, so I stopped at a Catholic Church on my way home from the hospital and lit a candle for her. The very next day, she just recovered. The doctors couldn’t explain it to us.
Those are the only two times I can recall ever lighting a candle in church for someone who wasn’t dead, so I really felt that my prayers had made a difference. I was less of an atheist then though.
The last time I prayed I had a bad case of food poisoning. This was over 10 years ago. I asked god to remove my terrible terrible pain. God declined. About an hour or two later a doctor saw me and gave me some medication which relived my pain. I’m pretty sure the doctor would of done that regardless of whether I had prayed to god an hour before.
I have asked St Jude for his prayers twice, and twice I feel I had an answer to my prayers. No, not the ‘cure for cancer’ kind of help, but they were life changing experiences. One happened almost instantaneously.
My experience has been that that sincere prayers when you’ve hit rock bottom, get an answer…it may not be the one you want, but there’s a response, you have to recognize it for what it is. Sometimes the response is guidance, or emotional strength, or just the right words to say.
There’s a joke/parable about a man who’s trapped on the roof of his house during a flood. He prays to God for rescue. A boat shows up to help him, and he says “I’m waiting for God to rescue me.” then a helicopter shows up and he says “I’m waiting for God to rescue me.” then a large floating wood raft bumps up against the house, and he doesn’t get on it because he’s waiting for God. Finally he drowns. When he’s facing God he says, “I prayed to you, why didn’t you rescue me?”
God says, “I sent a boat, a helicopter and a raft. What did you want?”
And Robert163–when i have a terrible pain I take bismuth tablets, and if that doesn’t work, I go to the ER. I don’t like to bother God and the saints with things I should be able to do myself.
OK - me being me and being odd again ------ it’s a hard one for me to say. I’ve never really kept anything like a score card and I’m one of those odd ducks who consider them answered even if the answer is “no”. IE - the opposite of what I want to happen happens.
One oft-repeated prayer I could call as answered in the affirmative was a great-uncle. He was basically given 6 months to live (multiple cancers) and was told to expect the end to be great agony. I prayed for two things with all the heart I could muster – that he live as long as possible (at least long enough to see me as an adult) and that when he did pass it be as painless as possible. He got within waving distance of two decades (was a pallbearer for the doctor who diagnosed him and made the original determination) and when he did finally die is was over in the matter of seconds. In the end it was his heart and not the cancer that put him under. His life in-between was as full and happy as one could wish. The usual aches and pains and flus but never enough to stop him from enjoying the things he loved.
After he was gone his kids (my cousins) took all the original tests and x-rays and some from along the years to another doctor for his opinion. That opinion was that the original doctor was right and he had basically been on bonus time longer than he (the new family doc) could explain.
In the greater scheme of the Universe does it mean anything much. Naaah - docs are bad guessers lots of times. But does it mean something to me? Yes - quite a bit.
So god is too busy to help me?
Not me, and we say it as a sort of joke, but my paternal grandmother got her deathwish. No, it’s not as nasty as it sounds!
My paternal family is generally pretty open about death. Death happens, it’s a part of life, and if you’re a Christian it’s even an ok thing for the deceased (not so much for those left “in this valley of tears” missing them). One time we were talking about ideal ways to die, and Abuelita said “I want it to be quick. Step off the curb distractedly, get run over by a truck, bam!”
We exclaimed “but what has that poor truck driver done to you! Why should a poor innocent man spend the rest of his life in anguish just because you wanted a quick death?” “Huh. Oh. You’re right.”
She changed it to “I want to have my business in order” (except for the piles of Stuff in the attic, she did) “and enough warning to make my peaces, but no long drawn illnesses”. Not only did she get that wish, but she was very devout of Mary and died on a Saturday (“Mary’s day”, when many Catholic churches finish the Mass with the singing of the Salve), March 25th (feast of the Annunciation, Mary’s biggest feast). The half-joke was instantaneous: since she had evidently gotten her wish and then some we could count on her being in Heaven straightaway trying to come up with ways to organize it better. The priest remarked that it is always heartening to see a family who on one hand clearly loved the deceased and on the other takes the death with such good humor.
Another one for death wishes: one year, every single girl in my dorm passed every single course in June (definitely not expected); the dorm belongs to a religious order. The receptionist exclaimed “see, I told you!” and explained. The convent part of the dorm hosts both the current set of working nuns and several old, retired ones; the eldest had died just before exams. The receptionist believed that every person who gets to Heaven gets one miracle granted, one wish, as a message for their loved ones below, and took our good grades to be the deceased’s sign.
At one point in college, my parents wanted me to quit. I was studying Chemical Engineering, I was doing decently by my school’s standards but alas, that wasn’t enough for the parentals. They wanted me to quit and go to secretarial school because evidently if you have a daughter who’s studying Engineering because she wants to be a Production Manager, she should be happy to become the Factory Manager’s administrative assistant instead, right? At one point I asked Jesusito (“Jesus, my pal”) for inspiration and it came - somehow I managed to hit on exactly the right words to get my parents to change their minds. Haaaaaalelujah! I swear I must be the worst salesperson on Earth, and I suck at defending myself, but I get chills when I think of that move… not only did it mean a complete change of career, but it meant going from being some 500km from my parents’ home and going there for vacations to being 97km away and going home every weekend to the pile of ironing, the pile of cooking, the pile of… no damn it thank you!
Oh, and for the record: I actually got the degree one year ahead of my class. Imagine if I’d been doing “well enough” :rolleyes:
I have many, and it’s not to me a ask for type of thing such as a genie, but often a conversation, going back and forth and being lead and instructed. Also that God lives in the human heart, so also telling others your request, if they really care about you, is telling God, so another channel to God, though His children (this channel is exploitable and why there is evil)
My mom was suffering with a undiagnosed condition and was hospitalizes, on a ventilator and feeding tube for about 3 months. They just could not find out what was wrong with her. I held a event where it was a spiritually based physical activity get together for the diagnosis of my mom and for all others who suffer from a undiagnosed condition. The very next time I saw my mom in the hospital this doctor who neither myself or my dad knew, turned around from the nurses station and walked directly towards us and said that he would like to run this test on her, which ended up leading to the diagnosis and her returning home (after a lengthily rehabilitation).
Another time I was sick with some sort of food poisoning late at night and alone. It was one of those sickness that you just feel trapped in feeling awful. My prayer lead me to paste how I feel onto facebook, after I posted it I felt this amazing peace as most of the sickness feeling lifted, allowing me to get to sleep and sleep the rest off.
In that I can commonly feel when people are praying for me, it’s a connection of the hearts that we all share and we are all really one in each other as I see it.
God was too busy to save my son from dying in 1996, despite the effectual and fervent prayers of my righteous mother.
God was too busy to save my mother from dying in 2006, despite the effectual and fervent prayers of her righteous husband. For bonus points she got to linger in humiliating agony for months.
I’ve never had anything happen that I could attribute to an answered prayer. I use to pray quite a bit until I was around 30 YO.
I don’t pray for myself. I pray for other people, but it is usually general “Lord, please take care of XYZ today. Give her strength to face her challenges.” Those aren’t the types of situations that have a yes/no solution. Was XYZ able to face her challenge? I don’t know. But praying makes me feel better.
I think you have mentioned both of these events on the board before, Skald, and I wanted to take a moment to let you know that I am truly sorry that you and your family had to go through them.
I’m in no way attempting to “convert” you or anyone else with this, but it did remind me of a speaker I heard once who said something along the lines of “We humans tend to give both God and Satan way too much credit and blame”. As a Christian I believe that God, through His methods, created the universe. I believe that He created it to operate just as it does: independently, complete with natural disasters, disease, good times, and bad times. I believe that He can/has/does change the natural order of things based on prayer but, IMHO, the vast majority of the time chooses to let nature run it’s course as designed. I don’t know that we can ever tell for sure in any specific case (short of the sun standing still or a sea opening up) which was which. As get older I find myself praying less for changes to the natural order and more time praying for strength, comfort, wisdom and understanding to deal with the natural order - both for myself and others. These prayers, I’m convinced, are the ones God answers in the affirmative quite often.
I have prayers answered all the time, but my secret is that I never ask God to do something, I only ask questions. One of my favorite answers was the very first one I ever got. I had been considering using prayer as one way to deal with anxiety, and then my VCR disappeared. I totally freaked out, and decided this was as good a time as any to try prayer. So I asked God where my VCR was, and God said, “You left it on top of the newspaper box at the bus stop.” Sure enough, when I went back to the bus stop, there was my VCR. I have since used prayer to ask more significant questions about my life, and I frequently get answers, some of which have had major consequences. But I still love the sheer randomness of that first answer.
I was an atheist long before my son died, and not because anybody had died. I became an atheist because I read the Bible and paid attention. I don’t blame God for Corbin dying for the same reason I don’t blame Darkseid.
Please forgive my misreading, though as I said my post wasn’t to you per se. Your post reminded me of the speaker.
No problem.
I prayed that I would find a new job and I did. I prayed for a better relationship and the pther person started to be nicer to me. I prayed for more friends and an old friend moved back to the area after 20 years. I prayed for hope in a situation and the next three songs I got on my ipod showed me the answer I was looking for. I prayed for help with a mental situation and later that day I got the correct way of thinking about the problem from a podcast.
Those are all within the last year.