If Prayer Works, God is Bad

She pressed her tongue depressor against his cheek.

Bruising.

Bruising in his mouth.

My heart sunk through the floor. That's when I knew.

Cancer. He had cancer. Here I was 35 weeks pregnant with my first, who I had found out was breech just the day before,

and now this.

That night they rushed my husband down the road from our small town hospital where I worked as a nurse to Hopkins. In an ambulance.

"Ma'am, your husband is very sick."

Why did they keep saying those haunting words?

The long wait. Four days till diagnosis.

A flip of the coin: 98% chance of survival for option A, 67% chance for option B.

With a brand new baby on the way, a 67% chance suddenly felt like 1%.

I could not.

At the time, I was a devout Christian. Daily devotions. Weekly church. The works.

One would imagine that I would be "pleading with God," but I did not. I could not.

Suddenly everything I had ever been told about prayer seemed infinitely important. And utterly meaningless all at once.

Texts were coming in by the minute: "I'm praying for you! We're praying for you! Our entire town in another state is praying for you!"

What was the magic bullet?

Suddenly it hit me: Prayer had never REALLY mattered before in my life until this moment. Ever.

Was it how many people prayed? The intensity, the frequency? Proper incantations? Some holy person who had an unfair "in" with God? Praying in the bottom of a swimming pool in Alaska doing a backflip in the winter?!

I needed to know. But that very need caused me to confront the uncomfortable reality: All of this was beyond absurd.

A God who worked like that.

A God who sat back and watched us suffer in torment. Exhausted. But staying up late pleading with Him to do what He could do with a flick of the cosmic wrist.

A God who could be manipulated.

Manipulated.

His ways are higher than ours and other bullshit like that. F*ck that.

Something deep within me screamed.

So what if it was His "will" that my baby's Daddy died before she was born? That for some unknown--unknowable--cosmic "Higher Purpose" it would be better off.

Then wouldn't I be f*cking with fate to pray?

Or let's just say that somehow it WAS His will for Ryan to live. And we pushed all the right buttons, botta bing botta boom... Ryan's life--spared!

But then THAT God would have NOT enacted His own good will without my human magic?

I had no need for a man that small.

People ask if I got mad with God.

That never even made sense to me.

Because from my observation... if "God" worked that way... Whatever "God" that was...

There really wasn't a God to "get mad at."

Because that God...

...Simply wasn't.

I quit praying, for awhile. Then I did again. Then I didn't again. Then I just didn't know.

It just didn't make sense.

Then my mental illness in 2021 and it all made less sense.

Yet there was something more, something beyond.

I could feel it. Almost see it.

The synchronicities. Chance meetings. Random things all aligning and stacking up.

A feeling of being taken care of. Miracles, in a deep sense.

How?

I don't know. To this day I still don't know.

Is God a man? A mystical deity? The collective consciousness? An energy force field? All of us? Within us, outside of us... reality itself?

I don't have all the answers. I sense something. I experience something. Every day. Almost nonstop.

Something... more.

Outside of me. Within me. Beyond me.

Love? Relationship?

It's deeper, wider, broader than I knew.

More complex and infinitely simpler than I imagined.

And something inside of me whispers, I don't have to know.

It's ok to just "be."