BY ROMMEL YNION
PEOPLE often wonder why they don’t get answers to their prayers no matter how much they prayed to God. And, frustrated, they ask themselves, Where is God? Is God having a siesta or in a state of coma that prayers often remain unanswered? Does God still love us? Has this planet become too overly populated that God has lost His capacity to answer each one of them?
The tragedy of our age is that nobody, especially in our schools, has ever taught us how to pray. Yes, to communicate with one another as human beings was what we learned from school. But has anyone taught us how to pray to God in a way that our prayers are guaranteed to reach God and at least elicit a response from Him?
Now, the answer to the above question is obviously “no”. Because we have all been to school, fully aware that our teachers only taught us prayers often uttered by rote, and if not, said in a way that is more imbued with doubt than with faith. No doubt we never learned the science of prayer. That is just the long and short of it.
What, in heavens name, is the science of prayer all about? It is simply about the law of reciprocity which means that for every prayer we send to God, there is an equal or greater answer to it based on the substance of what we prayed for. For example, we have prayed for more peace of mind, and instead, received the opposite of it. Why? It is simply because our prayers were soaked with doubt which became their “substance” to which God responded accordingly.
Let us beware of the internal debate that transpires when doubts set in when we pray. The mind, stuck in a state of doubt, tends to conjure the opposite of what it conceives. Try walking on a tightrope and begin to doubt your ability to finish the exercise. And chances are, as doubts begin to creep in, you start losing your balance and begin to fall. Now, that is the classic example of how doubt defines the substance of our prayers.
Faith, therefore, is important to keep our prayers consistent with their “substance”. When we pray then for health or wealth, let us have absolute faith in God’s capacity to give it to us in His time. In this case, faith means a quiet confidence that God will deliver and that our prayers will, no doubt, come to pass. In fact, the Bible has taken this principle a step further: When ye pray, believe that ye has received, and ye shall receive.
Take note of the grammatical structure of that biblical sentence. In colloquial terms, that simply means that as we pray, we must believe that what we pray for is like a pizza already ordered and will be delivered to us by hook or by crook, one way or another, come hell or high water. Now, fundamentally, that is simply the essence of faith.
Exasperated with his disciples’ lack of faith, Jesus gave them a pep talk that has rankled through the ages: “Because you have so little faith. Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there’, and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”
What then is faith that the Bible itself is just all about it? Since God Himself authored the Bible, He may have planned it to be just like a jigsaw puzzle for all of us, His children, to figure out, put together, and marvel at. For everything is already there, like a manual for living, loving and learning. And the crux of it all? Faith. And, surprisingly, if the Bible can be summed up in just one word, it is “faith”. No doubt, based on this biblical evidence, God only wants us to embrace faith and practice it in our lives.
The way faith has soaked every iota of the Bible especially in the teachings of Christ, it simply means that it is the only power that God Himself responds to as He continues to work through our lives. It is essentially the only conduit between God and man without which humanity is like a rudderless boat drifting aimlessly through life.
Wracking their brains to unravel the mystery of faith, psychologists discovered an immutable principle that defined the science of prayer: The Mind Principle. In this discovery, they dichotomized the mind into the conscious mind and the subconscious mind. At the risk of oversimplification, we pray through our conscious minds and God answers through our subconscious mind.
The dichotomy of the mind reveals the dynamics of faith. The conscious mind is the seat of logic and, well, thinking. With it, we think, analyze, and yes, pray. On the other hand, the subconscious mind is the reservoir of memory, and the storehouse of life’s experiences. The Bible has referred to this sea of limitlessness as the Book of Life in which the story of humanity itself had been written long before time began, knocking some chronological sense into our minds.
The conscious and subconscious minds, therefore, work together, bringing forth happiness, peace of mind, and wealth especially to those who use it positively, and creating discord, unhappiness, trouble and poverty to those who use it negatively. It’s like a river flowing upstream to positivity and downstream to negativity, depending on how we use it.
Imagine then the conscious mind as the master of a castle and subconscious mind as his slave. Once the master wants wealth, happiness and peace, the slave delivers in accordance with his wishes. But sometimes miscommunication ensues, especially when emotions taint the orders of the master with a different meaning, that the slave delivers to the master not exactly what the latter wants. In that sense, it is emotion that triggered misunderstanding.
Let us beware then of the emotions that come along with our prayers for they can clothe them with different meanings. For example, when we pray for wealth while envying the rich among us, then we are making mixed signals to our subconscious mind through which God responds to us. On the one hand, we want wealth while on the other hand, we hate it if it is possessed by neighbors we abhor. Emotions, especially the misguided variety, often cause us to receive from God the opposite of what we prayed for.
If we, therefore, need God to answer our prayers, we need to pray to Him while keeping our feet firmly anchored on the principle of the human mind, making our desires clear to Him, believing that in His kingdom our prayers are becoming realities as we say them, having faith that in His time and in His name, we shall receive them as “blessings” in our lives.
Can we imagine how life would have been simpler had we known the science of prayer since childhood? The fact that until now, our schools still don’t teach them boggles the mind, condemning the human race to an endless cycle of booms and busts, institutionalizing hopelessness as a reality of life not as an anomaly of nature brought about by man’s ignorance of the power within him to conquer all.
Indeed, faith, even as small as mustard seeds, can move mountains, serving as the key that unlocks the window of heaven from which God himself pours His blessings upon us until, satisfied beyond our wildest dreams, we can let our hearts soar to ideals that transcend our hierarchy of needs, transforming us into intelligent stewards of the earth that serve not the greed of the few but the interests of the many that satisfy the common good./PN
