Asking God for Help

Interfaith Celebration Gathering

Asking God for Help

Is God is always the first place you turn for help? Quite often in our ego-oriented thinking, we believe there is no problem we cannot think our way out of or solve. When we run into a figurative brick wall, we pride ourselves on being able to discern how to go over it, around it or through it. After all, we are adults and we are supposed to have all the answers, or so we have been taught.

When we were little, we looked to adults for the answers to everything, and we longed for the time when we would be older and know all the answers like they did. Then when we reached our teen years, we were convinced we knew much more than our parents. For most of us, it isn’t until we reached our twenties that we realized how very little we knew of life and the answers to life’s questions and challenges.

At this point we either admitted how little we knew and found ways to get help, or we plowed ahead, using bravado to make it look like we knew the answers. Either way, most of us somehow did not learn the most fundamental life lesson of all – that the best place to turn for answers, help, and illumination is God. Nor did we learn how to ask God for help.

Most of us know some of the words to use in asking God for help, but for us these words are no more than a magical formula to wrap around the fact that what we are actually doing is asking God to allow our will to be done. We come to God for help and we list the resolutions to our problems that we desire, even sometimes prioritizing them in terms of which resolutions are most acceptable to us. We give God a list of our needs and our wants, and we ask that they be fulfilled. God’s will is in no measure a part of our prayers, but our will is front and center.

We solve relationship problems by asking God to help the other person 'see the light.' The 'light' to which we refer in our prayers is our way of doing things. When we ask for help for others we ask for what we think they need, not that their highest good be done. If they are crippled, we ask that they be allowed to walk. We pray sight for the blind, and hearing for the deaf. We pray for right-mindedness for people we perceive to be wrong-minded. "Dear God, please fix these people (so that we do not have to be concerned with them again)."

There is a strange phenomena about these methods of asking God for help - after a while it seems like God is ignoring us. Of course, this validates what we strongly suspected all along – that God would not hear us or help us. After all, why should we trust someone we cannot see or hear to care about what happens to us?

We continue to follow our life-long predilection for doing things ourselves. We are so used to solving things by ourselves or asking other people for advice that God remains the last place we turn for help (on the off chance that God will really hear us and help us). Prayer for us continues to be just a one-way request line rather than a two part conversation.

We continue to operate on the 'free will' God gave us without ever realizing that we can give our ‘free will’ back to God. We can ask that God's will be done, not our own. But to truly do this means we have to be willing to accept whatever happens and however our prayers are answered as being in our Highest and Greatest good. We have to have a deep and abiding faith that God’s will for our lives is better than our will for our lives.

When we pray, we can still ask for things we want to happen or things we want to get. We just need to add the line, "if it be Thy will" and accept that what we want may not be what is bet for us. When we pray for others, we can send love to them and ask for their Highest Good. The Highest Good for a newly blind person might be learning to adapt to sightlessness. Handicaps, after all, can be blessings in that they afford us a tremendous opportunity to grow spiritually.

When we pray for people with whom we are in relationships, we can send love to them, and pray for their Highest and Greatest Good. If our relationships are in difficulty, we can ask that we be assisted with our own perceptions of the relationship rather than that the other person involved in the relationship be ‘fixed’. Frequently, all that is required to heal a relationship is a shift in our perception of it.

When we ask God for help that is in accordance with God's will, while we cannot know what form that help will take, we can be sure it will always be there. We may have trouble recognizing the help that is sent to us, because often it looks nothing like what we imagined we needed. We just need to accept that we do not always know what the Greatest or Highest Good is for ourselves or others.

Of course, our egos would still have us think we know all the answers. Our egos are the part of us that covers up our insecurities with bravado. But, since, e-g-o stands for Easing God Out, we need to invite God back in and recognize that we do not know all the variables that govern our own or other people's lives.

Once we turn our ‘free will’ over to God, we can see the results of God’s actions in our lives when we look back on past events. We can see that asking God for help actually resulted in our getting the help we desired.

May God add a blessing to these humble words.

AMEN