Prayers answered?

An answer to prayer will always be defined on an individual basis.

By this I mean: you see or hear a person answer a telephone you know they are communicating with someone you can’t see.

When you see someone offering a prayer don’t immediately know if it was heard much less answered.

I know what you mean when you say:

Probably the biggest thing in my life I ever needed help with seemed to fall on deaf ears. It sort of burned me on prayer for the future.

I have had the same experience. For me I felt like I was part of a giant kosmic joke. It (frankly) pissed me off.

I didn’t pray for along time. Even today, I do it sporatically.

There have been other times when I didn’t even utter a prayer & felt like God was talking to me.

But again, it was a feeling. I don’t think God has to speak to you face to face to receive a direct answer.

I received an answer to a prayer about marrying my wife, in a dream. I was very clear & I remember it to this day. This kind of answer is rare for me.

Most of the time maybe the answer is: “be still, wait & listen. While you’re waiting, here’s some peace”.

My two cents.

Mike from Milton.

This one sounds dumb. But it happened. Before I was baptized, there was a girl in my French class in university (I as a naive stupid 20 year old, in contrast to my cynical, stupid 40-odd years old now). I thought she was gorgeous and intelligent. I asked her out on a date, she rebuffed me as a I stammered through my ridiculous invite without really being myself. There was too much infatuation intereference for me to even carry on a normal conversation. It must have been creepy for her.

I felt like a heel. Classes were over, so I asked if the Lord would give me a chance to have a normal conversation so I could be who I REALLY AM and redeem myself. This was very important to me at that point in my young life. Now, I don’t think I’d invest a second in such prayers given my age, and the fatigue from being an idiot so often (self-forgiveness comes more easily when you realize being STUPID is chronic). But anyway, at the time, it was really important to me. I didn’t have to get a date, and wouldn’t even ask for one — I just wanted to reclaim my self-respect by being myself. I wouldn’t even broach the idea of getting together with the girl, just talk and leave on a self-respecting note.

I prayed regularly for this. Three days later, I got on the bus to go to the campus (a huge campus, with thousands of students). I sat down, and she was sitting right across from me. We talked about classes and such, and had a normal conversation.

I don’t know if this was the Lord or not, but classes were just over with now and it was the summer. I wasn’t on my normal routine. I had never seen her before on the bus or any place other than my French class. To me, it seemed too coincidental to not be some kind of intervention.

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The other time was when I was suffering with some kind of light depression after my mission. I was upset about something; I know not what. I asked someone I knew to give me a blessing. Right after the blessing I felt like I’d taken a sedative or something. The burden I was carrying was totally gone, my mind felt like it was full of light. My chest no longer felt the depression feeling. I had not taken a sedative, and was not on any medication whatsoever, I just felt like whatever burden I was carrying was gone. I asked this same person for a similar blessing months later and her refused, telling me to talk to my home teacher. No one ever had that effect on me ever since when I’ve asked for a blessing.

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One exception…10 years into my marriage, I was about ready to leave. My wife had not done her part to consummate our marriage, and I was worn out. I told God that if things didnt’ change, I was leaving. Period. I had a daughter , and felt terrible that I had brought a child into that relationship through artificial means, as she was a lovely girl toddler. But in spite of this strong pull, I saw myself aging, miserable, having tried my absolute best for a decade, and not much had changed. I asked only that there would be progress. When I got up from the prayer, I realized that I now had the gumption to leave my wife. I visualized that within in as short a period as 24 hours I could have my own single life, a clean place to live on my terms, and hope that i might have a more fulfilling relationship. I had real intent.

A few days later she told a doctor about the problem as part of a health checkup. The doctor refused to believe that she had a problem!!! This made her VERY ANGRY, so she did some therapy exercises she had been taught years previously and had neglected. She did them with a vengeance. And within a few two weeks of my prayer the problem was solved. She knew nothing about my prayer or my intention to leave. I sometimes think God put that callous doctor in her way because He knew it would trigger her temper and make her work at the problem. Interesting how God intervenes when you’ve hit your limit — at least, that time.

To this day, I don’t understasnd why a woman would get that kind of motivation from someone not believing she had a problem, but in this case, it was just what she needed to do her part.

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Funny, I read these things and I wonder how I cannot believe that God answers prayers as the experiences were very real to me. I think it’s because as I’ve gotten older, I have fewer and fewer of these experiences, even as I was serving faithfully as a TBM person. Meanwhile, the problems at Church have been many….and probably teh most poignant and heart-wrenching, and unsupported by prayer. It seems the older I get, the less frequent the answers to prayer come. And the issues seem even more important, like my son’s chronic illness, my marriage.

Cadence, do you still allow yourself to believe prayers float up to a God, are heard, and some action is taken through the spirit in response to them?

I choose to believe in God. And I really mean I “choose” to believe. There is nothing that I can point to to say God does exist. Everything in my experience can generally be explained by rational means. So I simply choose to believe. So do I believe God answers prayers? In a very broad way yes. He answers prayers for humanity as a whole but rarely specific to an individual. I am more of a Diest. I do not believe God knows or cares about every microbe and atom in the universe. He is more interested in growth patters for us and the cosmos. he does not have everything planned out in every detail until the end, He is mostly interested in keeping things moving forward but is not in control of every molecule every day. Of course this is just the god I want to believe in so it is just my personal belief system.

I believe in being connected. Prayer is one way to get connected to God, the cosmos, and to other people (particularly if it is a family/group prayer). It is a form of personal and communal expression.

I have also had “answers” to prayer. In order to make sense of the times in my life where no answers were forthcoming, I have crafted a belief system where these “answer moments” were anomalies (things I can’t quite explain nor reproduce with any regularity) and are not to be expected. I still pray.

I cannot say with complete surety that God or some high power answers prayers or how it works. I will say that for many months I have been struggling with a religious crisis. In my heart I asked to find something that could help me with my shaken views. I was at a seminar for Acceptance Commitment Therapy. This sparked a conversation with the guest speaker about religion which led me to a site called mormonstories.org. I then happened to see some talk by some guy and about some support site he set up. I looked at the site and I finally had found what I was looking for. Could it be a coincidence or just a matter of time I found this place? Probably. But all of that happened with a space of an afternoon. I just happened to talk to the right person at the right time about the right topic and happened to find a talk out of hundreds on a site that led me here. I thanked God/Universe for the right things to happen so I could get some help.

The Island of Misfit Toys, with all its “suckiness”, still was a haven for the toys there – and their collective charity and openness to another misfit eventually got them delivered to good little girls and boys by that misfit.

Jesus was a true misfit in many, many ways – and he spent his life serving his own “kingdom of nobodies” – on an Island of Misfit Toys he intentionally and purposefully created during his ministry. Who cares if we are blind? He healed the blind. So what if we feel “dead” sometimes. He raised the dead. What does it matter if we are sick or tired or different? He loved the sick and the tired and the different in a very special way.

I believe we are doing God’s work here in a very real and important way – and I think if Jesus were to spend any time with members of the Church in a second ministry, it would be with those who struggle the most in the Church. I really think he would spend more time at sites like this than in our Sacrament Meetings – and I am not disparaging our Sacrament Meetings in any way by saying that.

I really love what we do here on our own Island of Misfit Toys – and my teary eyes as I type this are a testimony to that feeling. Just saying.

It really depends on what you are praying for. Praying for keys is an immediate thing, usually. Praying for world peace is not so much.

In my own life the most profound answers to my prayer have come over a period of years. They have to do with family members, my husband and my mother. It is a long story to explain how challenging it has been but simply put my husband has a bad temper and my mother is difficult to live with (she lives with us and my mother and husband have not lived peacefully for years which adds to the drama).

I have been caught between them for years. The worst of it lasted 10 years and we are coming out of that right now. I have been praying for help, strength, to know what to do and most of all for peace. In the middle of it all I’ve tried to keep 5 children learning and growing as they need to – having to do clean up,emotionally and spiritually, almost constantly. I am not perfect either and have had some lessons to learn myself. It has been a great big refining fire.

The pivotal point came in this way – five years ago I came to feel that my husband was going to pass away soon – received this impression in the temple – went back on a weekly basis in communion with Heavenly Father over this issue. I received counsel and comfort and resisted telling my husband for awhile until the stress in my body was so great that my neck hurt and I couldn’t move my head. I finally told him what I believed. He was angry at first. But it also drove him to his knees. He didn’t change right away. He is still learning. This past summer he was laid off. The time spent at home has been good for him. I still feel he will leave us sooner than not. But I don’t really know when. I have finally stopped thinking about it everyday, just in the past few months. It seemed to have the necessary effect on my husband. This and other similar experiences with my mom has helped her soften up as well.

I am not going to say that my prayers were answered without me doing anything but getting on my knees. It took a lot of work, years of persevering, and holding on for dear life. I won’t say we are out of the woods but I can say as I look back through the years that my prayers have been answered, little by little, day by day and by the sweat of my own brow.

Our purpose in life is to prepare to be with God. This has been my purist desire, to be back with Heavenly Father. The challenges of life, with God’s help, have prepared me and continue to prepare me to return to His presence.