Suddenly you look around

So today in the car, on the way to the post office, I realized that prayers were answered. And in the way I might have wanted them to be. A lot of the anxiety from the last month has alleviated, and the parts of it that haven't yet are well-founded anxiety (meaning, not just useless worry, but things I need to DEAL with).

Sometimes intercessory prayer seems almost pointless. Like, why would I pray for this or that if what's going to happen is going to happen? Can I really change God's will? What is God's will? Doesn't God know better than I do anyway and most of the time intercessory prayers are closer to magical thinking and wish fulfillment than really prayer?

And we've all been on the "no" end of intercessory prayer--we wanted that job or this person to recover or something to go well, and it doesn't work out that way. Sometimes, with appropriate distance and hindsight, we see why--how different life would have been for us if we'd gotten the house on Nottingham instead of the one on Halliday. But other times it's hard to see--why couldn't he have come out of the coma? He was 9. What was the purpose there?

Sometimes I think intercessory prayer is a way to focus my own head, especially when I pray for something to succeed, something that isn't based entirely on miracle or good fortune. A nun at my monastery said the purpose of intercessory prayer was to bring the whole world closer to God with tiny threads of hope. I like that image, but I'm bad at this kind of prayer. Which is perhaps why I'm not a perpetual adoration sister. Really.

But there have been a few small times when I realize that yes, I was on the "yes" end of it. My will and God's must have been, for a brief tangent line, in the same space. For a second I have a little breathing room. Which is, I think, behind my intercessory prayer of all kinds.