Erika’s Reviews > Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers > Status Update

Once when I was about to fly to the other side of the world and asked my church for prayers, my pastor said, "By the time you get on a plane, it's too late for beggy prayers. It's time for trust and surrender." These two things are almost all I want, but unfortunately, neither one is my strong suit.

God keeps giving, forgiving, and inviting us back. My friend Tom says this is a scandal, and that God has no common sense. God doesn't say, "I have had it this time. You have taken this course four times and you flunked again. What a joke." We get to keep starting over. Lives change, sometimes quickly, but usually slowly.

Even though I often remember my pastor saying that God always makes a way out of no way, periodically something awful happens, and I think that this time God has met Her match...Nothing can possibly make things okay again...It's beyond bad. It's actually a nightmare. But people don't bolt, and at some point the first shoot of grass breaks through the sidewalk.

They take it as their due. But you'll know. And it can change your whole day, which could be a way to change your whole life. And maybe one person in the car in the lane next to you or in line at the bank or at your kid's baseball game will notice your casual generosity and will be touched, lifted, encouraged...and later will let someone else go first. And this will be quantum.

You could almost flush with appreciation. What a great scam, to have gotten people of such extreme quality and loyalty to think you are stuck with them. Oh my God. Thank you.

...through prayer, we take ourselves off the hook and put God on the hook, where God belongs...When you get your hooks out of something, it can roll away, down its own hill, away from you. It can breathe again. It got away from you and ... listening to you whine "What if?" and "Wait, wait I have ONE more idea..."

There is Thomas Merton's famous prayer, the beginning of which reads, "My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me."

Sometimes the first time we pray, we cry out in the deepest desperation, "God help me." This is a great prayer, as we are then at our absolutely most degraded and isolated, which means we are nice and juicy with the consequences of our best thinking and are thus possibly teachable.