It is, and it’s free! I can’t remember exactly where I downloaded it from, but after I did, I put it on my Kindle.

Yes, I agree we’d always be wise to look for lessons in what we’re going through. Sometimes they’re obvious; sometimes not. And sometimes maybe they are someone else’s lessons and not really our own except as a companion. Some things we just aren’t meant to know on this side of things.

Thanks for recommending this book. It was a good read!

I don’t really want to reply and disturb anything you’ve written–just refer people back to your comment…. Nice work there, Andrew! Thanks for sharing.

Thanks for the link to the biographies!

When I think of the people who were trapped in the upper stories of the WTC towers on 9/11, I wonder – did God hear their prayers?

And those who faced the fatal choice of burning, or deliberately jumping – did they not pray hard enough, or well enough?

There are those who say that 9/11 was a warning to America to turn back to God. It’s one of the most heartless things I’ve ever heard, and a God who would casually let people suffer and die to make a point is something out of a nightmare.

The retort’s often, “You imply that they were innocent, but no one’s innocent…we’re all condemned as sinners, fit for nothing more than eternal damnation without God’s grace.”

Precisely. The grace of physical salvation, unextended in extremis, begs the question of just what that grace is.

My belief is that grace is given to endure the life we’re in, and to remain a light even in the darkest, last moments. The world was created perfect, and fell because of God’s necessary condition of allowing free will.

To answer prayers that would negate free will would be internally inconsistent, and would turn a real and immanent and divine God into something of a pagan deity, one whose favor we could obtain with the right words and the right gifts. It would be another way to buy our way out of Hell.

To say that the quality and quantity of our answered prayers is proportional to the faith we muster turns the process into something like Uri Geller bending spoons through the power of the mind. Jesus used the example of being able to toss mountains if we had the faith of a mustard seed not to teach us advanced earthmoving but to show us how deficient our faith really is, by virtue of our human state.

Like you, I think we pray when we know we can’t do it alone, and our prayers open a door for that still small voice to tell us what we might do, or how we might best endure.

And yet…there have been things that happened in my life, that I can only ascribe to an answered petitionary prayer.

So in the end, I have no idea. I pray like it’s all up to God, and work like it’;s all up to me, and that has to be enough. I hope.