Along these thoughts, I wanted to relate an experience that I went through with my Mother. She was diagnosed with stage IV cancer. She prayed to God that he would heal her & that she would get better & continue living her life & enjoy the vacation she wanted to spend with her boyfriend in Hawaii. She went to a surgeon that she was told was an excellent surgeon. She went through the chemo & radiation before they could ever do the surgery because the cancer had spread too far & the tumor was too large to do the surgery on. Finally after a year of chemo & radiation, they did the surgery. The surgeon came out of the OR saying that "he got it all". From that point, my mother told me that God had given her the surgeon to save her life. From the point of the surgery, she continually had worse & worse problems, but she still believed that God had answered her prayers & the prayers of all her friends.

I had her hospitalized several months after her surgery for blood clots in her legs & I am sure that she had a mild stroke a few days before that hospitalization which no one would check for. When she was discharged from that hospitalization she could no longer get around with her walker & was going down hill daily. She kept asking me when she was going to get better because that was what she prayed. It wasn't until I told her that God's answer to her prayers wasn't going to be what she was wanting or expecting, but when she dies, she no longer will have the cancer.....& that was going to be God's answer to her prayers. She could no longer speak at that point, but the small squeeze of her hand let me know that she realized that what I said was true.

It isn't that anyone's God's answer is "no'. It is that the answer is a different answer than what "we expect it to be". We need to be open to whatever answer we get & continue to live our lives the best we can with what we are given. My feelings about prayers is that it is just a method of letting God know what we would like in our lives.....not what is going to happen because we want it. We have to live our lives the way they are. We can have plans that we want to have happen, but changes happen to us everyday & we have to deal with the reality of our everyday life. We can direct our future the best way we can, but that doesn't determine the actual outcome that reality gives us to work with.

I have found that when I deal with the reality of the world around me, I am much better off than trying to make it into something that it isn't or expecting something that isn't going to happen. Reality is what it is & that is the basis of everyones lives......we can't change what reality is no matter how hard we try or how much we ignore it.

Debbie