I don't know who or what God really is,
and maybe I never will.
What I do know is that my prayers get answered.
Sometimes it takes years, and sometimes
God answers my prayers before I ask,
and all I have to do is stop to look around.

I'm only human,
so I get frustrated when things don't go my way.
At times in my life I felt there was no God,
that prayers were like fairy-tales
and that somehow I was being cheated in life.

Then I grew a little older, a little wiser
with each passing year.
I realized that regardless if God existed,
where I was in life; my situation,
was a result of my own actions.
If I wasn't happy I was the only one to blame.
Blaming God seemed so much easier though,
because in strife God seemed too fictional,
too distant.

Blaming God for my strife was
like American's blaming Iraq for their deficit;
a Black man blaming a white man
for an ancestors enslavement;
a teacher blaming a student
for being unable to learn from them;
or a stranger blaming a homeless man
for high taxes.

It was absurd.

It was too easy to pass the blame.
“God, do you hate me?”
Even when I couldn't believe in it,
I spoke to God.
I had the audacity to ask for favors too,
because the worse my situation,
the harder my suffering,
the more I hoped God was real.
The more I prayed for help.

Some prayers take a life-time to answer
because we ask for things we are unprepared to receive.
On more than one occasion I asked God for love.
Selfishly I mean, I didn't ask for God's love,
but for God to provide someone to love me.
This was a common theme after a hard break up.
In time I learned that a hard break up
was a hard lesson to learn.

Each relationship taught me more about people
and more about myself.
As I learned about each I began to discover
who I was and who I wanted to be with.
First my friends began to change,
then my attitude towards relationships with women,
then the woman I dated.

I still felt empty at the end of each relationship,
even if I was agreeable with it ending.
Despite the lessons learned, I began to loose faith.
Not in God, but in man... or women more precisely;
and in myself.

Then I realized I had not been taking care of myself
Financially I was in turmoil,
I let myself become unfit,
emotionally I was sheltered,
spiritually I was in denial;
I was utterly exhausting myself.

I made new choices;
work hard towards a new career,
eat healthier and be more active,
get closer to family, tell friends I love them.

Then one night in a silent prayer,
I told God I was sorry.
We had a good one-sided heart to heart talk,
as God seems to be all action and no words.

I confessed my problems were my own fault,
and that I did not fully understand the lessons behind pain.
I spoke to God, it listened.

“I do not understand you,
but now I understand me.
Thank you for my life, God.
Thank you for this responsibility.”

When I finally let go of blame and took charge of my life,
God took this opportunity to step in.
The perfect woman for me,
the one I knew I wanted to spend my life with,
(so life's lessons had taught me)
came from the least likely of places.

All my life I was fascinated with Brazil;
the culture, the people, the way they looked at life.
All my life I lived in Canada,
never moving more than a stone's throw from home.
Then I moved to an isolated Northern Alberta oil city.
Far from where I would expect to meet a quality woman,
never mind the woman of my dreams.
Yet here, of all places, a Brazilian Angel greeted me.
We barely spoke the same language,
but there were no barriers between us.

We spoke for hours the first time we met.
Sometimes with words,
sometimes with Google translator,
but mostly with our eyes.

I knew then that God had answered a long standing prayer,
because I was prepared to receive it.
The lesson was clear;
I could not respect and love another
if I did not first respect and love myself.

Each morning I wake up to, “I love you.”
“I love you,” is what I hear before I sleep.

Prayers are fairy-tales.

03/06/2012

Posted on 03/06/2012
Copyright © 2024 Jody Pratt