Do I Still Believe in Prayer . . . What do You Think?

Once someone was listening to my typical rhetoric and in response said, "So you don't believe in prayer anymore?"

I do. My point is, most of what people say is answer to prayer I have serious doubts about. I have several reasons for this doubting. Tying this to the previous post, at this point in the discussion I'm almost always consider to be nonspiritual or not seeing the world through God's eyes . . . etc.

Besides my observations about reality, which tell me that if God works outside of nature, He does it rarely, there is also the philosophical consideration. I believe that the Christian world has a very skewed view of the physical world (which is the theme of this blog). They actually see this physical world, and the laws of nature (some of which you would call Newton's Laws of Physics) are all "worldly" or inferior. Therefore, for anything to be good, it must be above that . . . thus supernatural.

In my opinion, when something works out exactly according to all the laws of nature, at that juncture, I can give God honest praise, because God made nature and the laws thereof and He has made them good.

Now to my point.

Saturday night Denise and I went to bed. We were fast asleep when the phone rang. It was one of those phone calls that all parents fear.

On the phone was my son, Daniel's, girlfriend, (Maddie). Daniel is 24 and is in a PhD program at the University of Washington. The two of them were at a concert in downtown Seattle. Actually my third son, Tyler, was performing with his band at the concert. Once it was over, Maddie went to catch a bus and Dan jumped on his bike, in heavy traffic, to head home. During her bus route, she saw that the road was closed ahead. As the bus crawled by, she looked out the window and in disbelief, she saw Daniel laying in the street surrounded by paramedics.

I'm not sure how Maddie found out the following information, but I assumed she yelled out the bus window asking what was going on. The medics told her that the man had been hit by a car and they were loading him up to take him to a trauma center.

It was at this point Maddie called us. We all were in distress.

I began praying my heart out. It took about an hour to get any more information. The trauma center's ER at first could say that he was there. They could not say if he was alive, dead or with severe injuries.

To make things more difficult, Seattle is two hours away and my son, the one in the band, had our only car that could make the trip. We called Tyler and told him what was going on and urged him to get home ASAP.

We called the trauma center again. We spoke to the nurse. This time she could tell us "Daniel is stable and in CT right now."

It was about another hour before we actually got to talk to Daniel. To make a long story short, he was discharged in the morning with a lot of road rash, but no serious injuries. He was knocked unconscious, so we think, and doesn't remember the accident at all.

So, did God do a supernatural miracle and spare Daniel from death. I doubt it, but it doesn't matter. I still prayed. I still do believe that sometimes God does step into nature and change the laws of physics. But the old Mike would embellish the story at church and make it look like a miracle for sure. But I can equally praise God in the way He has made the world, the wisdom to use bike helmets (Dan's was destroyed in the accident), the coefficient of friction of the car's brakes and the way God has made our bodies, resistant to injury, quick to heal. It doesn't matter why Daniel survived with only scrapes. I can praise God that he did.