God Isn’t Fixing This?

                God Isn’t Fixing This.  So says a full-page headline in the New York Daily News criticizing politicians who offered the “meaningless platitudes” of prayer for the victims of the San Bernardino shooting.  I beg to differ. 

                Let’s start with the headline.  In the face of repeated terror attacks and senseless violence, I completely understand why people might lose faith and trust in God.  Hey, Jesus himself had his doubts:  “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?  (Matthew 27: 46)  Yet, it’s especially in the face of our most difficult challenges that faith and trust in God bear the most fruit.  You see, believing in God requires an eternal outlook.  God’s providence (his plan for his creation) isn’t limited to the temporal world; it’s eternal.  So God’s promises have to be understood and believed in an eternal context.  That means that we can’t expect that all of the world’s problems will be fixed right now, but we can expect that they are fixed eternally. 

                So what good does an eternal outlook do for us now?  How does faith and trust in God bear fruit now?  Well, they give us hope.  Hope, Google tells us, is a “feeling and desire for a certain thing to happen.”  The wonderful thing about hope is that it’s not simply a desire for a particular outcome; it’s also the expectation that it will actually happen.  Hope is an optimistic wish for future happiness that’s grounded in our steadfast belief that our wish will come true.  That’s why hope carries us through tough times and gives us the strength to persevere until we achieve our desired goal.  Without hope for peace, justice, security and a better world, they will never be achieved, and life would be pointless.  But through his promise of eternal happiness, God gives us the gift of hope that inspires us to seek and work for eternal happiness right now.  Hope inspires us to prayer for a better world and to listen for God’s answer to our prayers, which brings me to the Daily News’ reference to prayer as “meaningless platitudes.”

                  As I said in a recent post, "Prayer is the lifting of the mind and heart to God, an act of spiritual communion by which we unite ourselves, our concerns and needs with God and with each other.  Through prayer we step into the transcendent, spiritual world to fill ourselves with God’s eternal love and share it with others."  In prayer, we unite ourselves with God’s perfect, eternal peace, justice and love so that we can have perfect peace, justice and love here on earth as it is in heaven.  Meaningless?  Hardly.  Every act of prayer is an act of love, so with every prayer we bring a share of God’s eternal love into the world.  And love always triumphs over evil.

                Of course, for our prayers to be fruitful, we need to listen for God’s answer to our prayers and act upon it.  To be fair, I suspect that the Daily News reference to prayer as meaningless platitudes is based upon a belief that while certain politicians say that they are praying, they’re not acting upon God’s answer to their prayers.  If such is the case, the Daily News has a point.  Prayer that’s not open to God’s answer and inspiration, whatever they may be, isn’t prayer.  It is meaningless.  So as we pray for the victims of these horrible attacks, we also need to listen for God’s answer to our prayers and act upon it.  God’s inspiration will always lead us to happiness, peace, justice and love now and eternally.  When we pray, and listen, and act upon God’s inspiration, we'll soon find that God is fixing this – through us.