Prayer

Okay, I’ll admit that even when I thought I was a Christian, I wasn’t a very good one. I didn’t like to go to church because too many bad things had happened there. I saw too much hypocrisy in church. And later, when my son went to church, his Sunday school teacher was arrested for having sexual relations with one of the students, a 14-year-old girl. Just another reason to stay away.

Still, I believe strongly in God, and I don’t need a church to pray. I don’t typically say prayers in the supplicant fashion. Whether I’m standing, kneeling, or in a huge building, God knows I couldn’t even begin to reach His level, and he knows that I know it. So I will say prayers when it occurs to me: Oops, forgot to pray for my son today (God, please take care of him and show him the path to enlightenment); thought about my dad (God, please help him see his way to you, and if it’s his time to go, please let him pass easily); and so on. I know that God can hear my prayers, however silent and quick they are.

While I was in Iraq, we were attacked a lot. During the time I was there, many people told me they prayed for me. They prayed alone, and they prayed in church. Rockets and mortars and bombs killed people all around me. I was never scratched. After a while, I began to understand that, if God was ready for me, he would take me, so I stopped worrying about the attacks.

I often wonder how God takes all the prayers from both sides and does the right thing in spite of us. I don’t want to kill anyone, but I don’t want my brothers to be killed. And in God’s eyes, even those “bad guys outside the wire” are our brothers. It can get confusing. So I stopped praying for God to make my aim true. I stopped praying for God to help them see the error in their way. I started praying for God to use me to do the right thing, which He knows far better than I ever will.