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The Kind Of Prayer That God Answers

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This is the kind of prayer that God answers. We can’t pray that He makes our lives free of problems; this won’t happen, and it is probably just as well. We can’t ask Him to make us and those we love immune to disease, because He can’t do that. We can’t ask Him to weave a magic spell around us so that bad things will only happen to other people, and never to us. People who pray for miracles usually don’t get miracles any more than children who pray for bicycles, good grades, or boyfriends get them as a result of praying. But people who pray for courage, for strength to bear the unbearable, for the grace to remember what they have left instead of what they have lost, very often find their prayers answered. They discover that they have more strength, more courage than they ever knew themselves to have. Where did they get it? I would like to think that their prayers helped them tap hidden reserves of faith and courage which were not available to them before. The widow who asks me on the day of her husband’s funeral “What do I have to live for now?”, yet in the course of the ensuing weeks finds reasons to wake up in the morning and look forward to the day; the man who has lost his job or closed his business and says to me, “Rabbi, I’m too old and tired to start all over again,” but starts over again nonetheless—where did they get the strength, the hope, the optimism that they did not have on the day they asked those questions? I would like to believe that they received those things from the context of a concerned community, people who made it clear to them that they cared, and from the knowledge that God is at the side of the afflicted and the downcast.
-Rabbi Harold Kushner

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