It’s July of 2016 and a lot of people would say that it hasn’t been their favorite year. There has been a lot of death and violence around the world. Some things have not gone totally to plan for a lot of people. On a lighter note, even some movies have not been as well received as some might hope. In all of this, aside from the movie part, questions have been asked. Why has this happened? How can I get through this? What should I do now? We search for answers because that’s the only thing that we can do sometimes, sitting at home, watching the news on TV. We go to the internet to find articles and search for the information we need. We look on social media to the people that have some kind of opinion on the world that we think can help us understand it a little more. We turn to family and friends who are so much wiser than we are. Finally, when the shock is over and we’re sitting in our chairs thinking, some of us pray.
Prayer is a weird thing. It’s hard to explain it sometimes because of how meta it really is. The way I like to describe it is like this: every day God is with you. He hears everything you say, even when it’s not relating to Him. He’s like the person sitting at the table next to yours at a restaurant. But prayer means you are talking directly to Him. Spiritually, you are turning to Him and talking to Him and He talks back. No, I don’t mean you literally hear His voice in your ears (although I’m sure something like that has happened before). But it happens sometimes during prayer that an epiphany springs into your mind and you know exactly where it came from. God helps to give us understanding and comfort during the times when we need it.
Tim Tebow was criticized was a while ago for praying for a man’s family after the man suffered a heart attack on a plane. People scolded Tebow because they believed he was getting in the way of the people that we "really" trying to help the dying man. What I see when I read about this is that some people don’t understand what Tebow was really doing. He was praying for God to comfort the family. He wasn’t just praying for the man to be healed, he was making sure that the family was okay as they went through this horrible ordeal. Yes, we as Christians do like to use prayer to plead for the health of our loved ones, but we don’t see it as some magical spell that should be used in place of medicine. So when we go through something like the man’s family did, and we see that there is nothing we can do, we pray for comfort and understanding from God because that is all we can do.
2016 certainly, hasn’t been the greatest year in history. It certainly hasn’t been my favorite year so far. But that is why I sit, think and pray with God when I see what the world is doing today. I seek God because I know of no other fount of knowledge that can help me to understand. Try it some time.
