How God Answers Prayers

A missionary Gracepoint Davis (& Berkeley) are supporting sent us an email with an excerpt that I found to be helpful in understanding some unanswered prayers.  It turns out that the excerpt was from a book where a journalist (Peter Seewald) interviewed Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (who is now Pope Benedict XVI) about faith.  Here’s that section which may help you understand why sometimes it seems like God didn’t answer your prayer for help (God and the World, pp.40-41):

[Seewald:] Christ says, “Ask, and it will be given unto you.  Seek, and you shall find.  Knock, and the door will be opened to you.”  On the other hand, when my son for instance is about to do a piece of schoolwork, he asks God for help.  But, to be quite honest, it doesn’t always help.

[Ratzinger:] We ask, for instance, for good health; a mother does that for her child, a man for his wife; we ask that a people as a whole may not fall into great error – and we know that what we ask is by no means always granted us.  In the case of someone for whom it is a matter of life and , this can become a serious problem.  Why has he had no answer, or at least nothing like the answer he had asked for?  Why is God silent?  Why does He withdraw?  Why is it that just the opposite of what I wanted is happening?

This distance between what Jesus promised and what we experience in our own lives makes you think, every time – it has that effect in each generation, for each single person, and even for me.  Each one of us has to struggle to work out an answer for himself, so that in the end he comes to understand why God has spoken to him precisely like that.

[Seewald:] And what answer is there?

[Ratzinger:] Augustine and other great Christians say that God gives us what is best for us – even when we do not recognize this at first.  Often, we think that exactly the opposite of what he does would really be best for us.  We have to learn to accept this path, which, on the basis of our experience and our suffering, is difficult for us, and to see it as the way in which God is guiding us.  God’s way is often a path that enormously reshapes and remolds our life, a path in which we are truly changed and straightened out.

To that extent, we have to say that “Ask, and you will receive” certainly cannot mean that I can call God in as a handyman who will make my life easy every time I want something.  Or who will take away suffering and questioning.  On the contrary, it means that God definitely hears me and what he grants me is, in the way known only to him, what is right for me.

To come back to the particular case in question:  It may also be beneficial for your son to learn that God isn’t simply going to jump in when he has not learned his vocabulary properly, but that he has to do that for himself.  It may sometimes mean that he is not spared the little discipline that lies in failure.  For perhaps he really needs precisely this discipline in order to find the way he should go.