I saw it written somewhere that a retiring minister summarized God’s answer to prayer in one of 3 ways:

Yes
Not Yet
I Have Something More Wonderful in Store for You

The nuns at Notre Dame put it more succinctly: God hears every prayer, sometimes the answer is No.

Peace

Bob C

O God, blow clouds to Ethiopia
That rain might end its child-devouring drought;
O Lord, blow clouds away from Gloucestershire
So Dursley’s cricket match is not in doubt.

Are trivial prayers more likely to be heard
Than ones which would affect a nation’s fate?
If God exists do you think that he’s stirred
To puff at clouds and change the weather’s state?

Your prayer, you silly man, was heard all right
And answered too, before you came to be
He knew both nation’s and each person’s plight
In his unchanging creativity.

Omniscient and omnipotent God of love
Have heard our prayers so that the right clouds move.

….”He came to share “eternal life,” to assure us that death is not an end but a transition, into an endless life what we carry already inside ourselves when we accept his gift. We are here to manifest–in the freedom and joy of our lives–that we have an energizing understanding of life that we’re more than willing to share. His message—our message—is not about the darkness of sin but about the liberating energy of light, the fire of Pentecost, the exhilaration of the Spirit of God within each of us. It’s that same Spirit that brooded over the chaos at creation, the purposeful surge of intelligence that choreographed the dance of the cosmos, the spark that ignited the flush of self-replication when sluggish matter began to grow, the gush within vegetative life when it could suddenly feel and sense danger and move beyond brute submission. Then a quantum leap into self-awareness, the ability to discern good and evil. Finally, in the fullness of time, the Son of God entered our limitations to show us how to accept and evolve the gift of divine life within us.”

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