Gimmie, Gimmie, Gimmie!

Those of you old enough and/or Abba inclined enough can at this point rest easy. I am not about to write a blog post about my having a man after midnight. I am, however going off in a completely different tangent to talk about prayer.

We are all more than used to walking into a shop and in essence saying "Give me", though I am sure we are all much to polite to use those precise words. Having requested our product, we expect to be given exactly what we have asked for. Then should we get home and find that our product is broken, the wrong colour or just not what we expected. We go back and expect the shop to provide us with what we wanted or give us our money back.

Then we come to sit, kneel, lie, curl up or however you particularly like to pray. Much like when we are in the shop, we come with a lists of requests for God. Our list of demands, fix this, do this, I want my life to go this way and not that etc. I sit and kneel, often ( more often than is perhaps acceptable ) forgetting the giving thanks and asking for forgiveness and just demanding what I want in my life. Very often these are not request for me specifically, but those for family, friends and parishioners.  It is very easy to fall into the trap of expecting our prayers to be answered in just the way we would want.

It is very rarely the case that our prayers (or indeed much that is concerned with our Christian lives) ever really goes just the way we want. Now here comes the crux of the problem. We have no shop to take our grievances too.Therefore we have no way of changing the thing we want changed. It amazes me, just how quickly I can get frustrated when things do not go my way. I get angry with God, the people involved and then turn in on myself for being so selfish in the first place.  I have often wondered whether this tendency in me has been harboured by the modern expectation culture or whether this is a conflict that many have had throughout Christianity.

Now I could end this post there and it would sound dreadfully negative. It would feel as though prayer and faith, did not work and were essentially useless. But being me, I am not going to end it here. Prayers may not be answered in the way we want them to be. They are answered though.

Sometimes what we think we need, is very different from the experiences we actually need to learn and develop in our Faith.  Sometimes we need to experience disappointment and doing so can lead to some miraculous discoveries about yourself, your faith and others. Yes, I get angry. Sometimes over the most petty and selfish of things, sometimes over things that are really significant. Yes I throw my toys out of the pram, I am who I am. I believe passionately and when I am seemingly let down I am similarly passionately angry at life, God and all. However I have grown to value the points at which my prayers have not been answered in the way I wanted. Those times have taught me much about sides of me of which I am less than proud. They have forced me to stop and think about what is really important and what I can do to change that. They have led to my eyes being opened and discoveries in my spiritual life. They have also taught me, how invaluable my friends and family are. There are different ones for different situations, each of them a sounding board  that calms me down enough to show me or help me to see the way through.

Disappointment, helps us value the times we get what we want. Without it we would be smug and comfortable and never be inspired to help others in their sufferings too. Prayer works, just not always in the way we would like it to. But I can assure you your life is much richer because of that. So next time we have a list of demands, let's be thankful to God whichever way it turns out. Because (to steal a line from The Great Exotic Marigold Hotel ) "It will be all right in the end. If it is not all right, then it is not yet the end".

That is what faith and prayer is, an acceptance that at the end all will be well. We will be born again into new life, through the sufferings of Christ. We to must suffer, for only then we will truly understand the greatness of the gift that we will get when we reach the end.