A Desire for Hope

I've been thinking about the subject of prayer a lot lately. Part of it is due to the requests for prayer for Kayden, but it really began about a week before this.

I was playing around on the internet one morning and I stumbled across a blog written by the mother of a teenage girl who had been severely injured in a car accident. The blog was started within a day or two of the accident as a way to update friends and family on the girl's condition.

As is the nature of blogs, the most recent posts are listed first, so I began reading about 2 months into this girl's recovery. As is the nature of, well, me, I got curious to know the whole story, so I went back and started reading from the beginning. (Yes, I spent far too much time on this that particular morning.) What I read was heartbreaking and sad in more ways than one.

The teenage girl lost her leg in the accident and had many other very severe injuries that will significantly affect her for the rest of her life. For several weeks, her injuries threatened to take her life. I read each post from this girl's mother and could not help but try to imagine how hard it must have been for this mother to have to stand by, helpless to do anything, and watch her daughter go through this horrible ordeal. I could feel the pain and the heartbreak in the mother's posts on the blog.

That was the heartbreaking part. The thing that made me sad was something different. In reading through the comments and the replies, it was quite apparent that the family and many of the girl's friends were not at all religious. In fact, some openly admitted that they didn't believe in God or any religion. Yet almost without fail, even those who claimed not to believe promised to pray for the teen's recovery. I had to wonder why.

Why would someone who claimed to not believe in any god, much less the God of the universe, even bother to pray? I don't think it was just a figure of speech. That question just keeps popping into my mind.

As I've thought about it, I've come to the conclusion that no matter how much we as human beings try to deny it, we all understand somewhere deep down in our souls, that there is something, someone who is more powerful than we are. We all understand, even those who don't want to and proclaim loudly that they don't, that there must be a higher power that cares about us as individuals, otherwise why would our first instinct, when faced with a frightening situation, be to say a prayer? If there really is no god, if there is nothing greater than ourselves in which to believe, then why do we all call out to Him in our time of need?

Along that same line, if these people honestly do not believe in a caring god or a higher power, then how utterly hopeless their lives must be. After all, we all need to feel loved. We all need to believe that someone cares for us and wants the best for us. That desire is in every single human being. We all need hope. Hope that there is more than just this life because this life will eventually fail us. Hope that we are loved by someone, somewhere, unconditionally, because every single person in our lives will fail us in love somewhere, somehow. If a person has no hope in a God who is exponentially greater than our frail humanity, then what hope do they have? How sad and fearful their lives must be. What a frightening place this world must seem to those with no real hope. Perhaps this explains why our world seems so lost.

So why would someone deny that deepest desire in their souls? Why do people choose to live without hope? They do it for the very same reason that Adam and Eve did. They listen more to the voice of temptation than the voice of Love and they fall prey to the oldest lie in history...that they can be like God. They believe that they can control their own destiny and so of course, if they are like God, why would they need Him? They take charge of their own lives and forget all about God and they do okay...for a while.

But then, life throws a little more at them then they can handle and all of a sudden there's nothing left that they can do, nowhere else to turn and no one left to care. That's when they finally realize, even on a subconscious level, that there must be someone else they can depend on, someone greater than themselves, and so they start to pray. And that's when God throws out the life line. He's been standing there waiting for them to call, waiting to rescue them from themselves all this time. He knew what would happen when they tried to do it themselves, but He allowed them to try it anyway. And now, He offers His help yet again, but it's up to the individual to accept it. Accepting it promises hope and security, love and a new chance at life. Rejecting it offers death. The choice is once again, ours to make. Personally, I choose hope and life.