If God Answered My Prayer

I've been a Christian since I was a little girl. I grew up in a Pentecostal church, "backslid" like any good church kid does, and then honestly chose to follow Jesus at the age of sixteen.

My early twenties brought me a lot of grief, questions, pain, mixed emotions. I began to open my eyes to the world as it truly was and not just to the world I saw while I was inside the walls of my church. I began to question what I had believed for so long. I, like many if not all Christians, began to doubt.


This began in me what has been a long process of growth. I've delved into philosophy, science, theology. Studying evidence of God's existence, atheism, the historicity of the Bible, DNA, and anything else I could get my head around. It's brought me through some dark places, reading the writings of atheists from the past and today, and coming out on the other side a firmer believer. A more grounded believer. But still a believer with doubts. Sometimes I question whether God exists at all. I see the evil and pain in the world around me, not so much the heinous evils perpetuated by man, but the natural evil that seems to have no cause. Cancer in children, earthquakes that massacre us. It leaves me wondering why. Answers abound as to how God can exist even though there are evils in our world, and why that is so, and I'm not trying to answer that question right now.

There are times when I've asked God...

"Please. Just show me that you exist."

Bear in mind that at this point, when asking this question, you've already decided in your mind that our universe, Earth, and life itself aren't enough evidence. Sometimes, I think we want more. We want that audible voice, that writing on the wall.

I don't have all the answers and I have yet to figure it all out. I have a sneaking suspicion that God can be found by us if we will seek him. Yet, instead of honestly seeking, we ask the God of the universe to "prove" himself to us.

And so I ask. What if he answered? What would happen to us?

If, as I sat at my computer typing, God came and sat next to me. Jesus in my kitchen. No frills, no halo. Just Jesus. And he sat there, staring, maybe waved and said, "here I am". "Do you ever clean this kitchen?"

What would the aftermath of that look like?

Or maybe let's go simpler. I say to God to make lightning strike a tree in my yard to prove he exists. He does. Then I ask him to perform a series of miracles and he does. Both examples have given me solid proof, the second example maybe a little less so.

Let's say for a moment that we knew God existed in an overwhelming, obvious, no-doubts manner. What would the aftermath be? Seriously. Let's consider it.

From that moment on, everything we did would be different. First of all we would want more contact with God, and a universe where God talks to us constantly is called Eden. If you read the Bible you will understand why we don't live in Eden.

Secondly, I'd like to contend that we would no longer be free to choose our actions. Everything we did would be measured by how it would make God feel about us. We would probably focus less on soccer, reading sci-fi novels, or acting and solely devote all of our time to forcibly doing things to please God and make sure he was happy with us. I feel as though the quality of our lives would decrease as simple pleasures would lose their value.

My examples may seem far fetched to you. But I think it's worth asking ourselves how we would truly react if God proved himself to us and how it would effect our lives.

Maybe there's a reason why he doesn't prove it as obviously as we want and sometimes demand. As though, if there was a God, he would somehow be obligated to answer us exactly how we want in that moment. That God seems less feasible to me. It makes more sense that God would create a way and then let us choose whether to follow that way or not. After all, a God that is called "love" itself, would not want us to come as slaves, but of our own choice.