Month: March 2021

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The Elephant In The Room: Unanswered Prayer

The Elephant In The Room

This post is a tough one. It is a post however, that is necessary, to address the subject of unanswered prayer. I mean those prayers where you prayed so intensely that you thought your insides were going to explode. I mean those prayers where you felt that somehow, someway, through your prayers, the solution to the problem would arrive. Then it didn’t. Up front I want to emphasize that this post is not a “how-to” on how you deal with unanswered prayer. If you do an internet search of “how to deal with unanswered prayer” you will come up with tens of thousands of websites that will claim to have that answer. The purpose of this post is to address this issue — the proverbial elephant in the room — and ask you to do your own search for answers to this universal phenomenon. I ask you to do this because it will be a search that will wind up enhancing your life, making it fuller, making it richer. Isn’t that something that we all want out of life?

Answers To Unanswered Prayer

The are a “gazillion” of ministries out there that will give you their answer to unanswered prayer — “Joe Blow Ministries”, “Sally Dingelhammer Ministries”, “We Really Want Your Donations Ministries”, “We Know Everything About Everything Ministries”, “If You Don’t Agree With Us, It’s Blasphemy And You’re Going To Burn In Hell Ministries” and so on. Some are sincere and helpful. Some are not. It seems that the short and sloppy answer that most often crops up is that every single prayer is answered. Every single one of your prayer requests is answered with one of three answers: Yes, No or Not Yet. I don’t think Maybe is in there. I cannot see Almighty Supreme Intelligence scratching his beard and saying “Hmmm, I’ll have to think this one over”.

Various Responses

There are a number of ways you can respond when your prayer requests go unfulfilled. The first is just giving up and stopping any further prayer in the “What’s the use, I don’t want to be disappointed any more” response. The second is guilt in the “I guess I’m just too sinful for God to even hear my prayers”. The third is anger in the “How could a loving God allow something like this to happen” response. The fourth is found in the example of the importunate widow in scripture in the eighteenth chapter of Luke…. just keep praying…even if you don’t feel like praying.. How have you dealt with it? There are many other types of responses but the above four are those that I have experienced. And yet, despite the crushing effect of unanswered prayer, we are left with the unmistakeable instruction to keep on praying (“pray without ceasing” KJV First Thessalonians 5:17). Every time I have a lapse in my prayer life, that short verse from scripture always comes up and slaps me flush on the face. So I resume praying. but with a difference. My desire increases to learn more about effective prayer, true prayer, righteous prayer. To pray wrongly is not prayer. I get this intutive feeling that true prayer and manifesting my life’s true desires are inextricably intertwined. So I continue pushing on with the search for effective prayer. I will probably keep on searching until the day I die. Despite all the disappointments you may have suffered, I hope that you do also.

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One Foot In Front Of The Other

My Mother

I admired and loved my mother deeply. She was a wonderful woman. I miss her dearly. She was also a fiercely independent woman. She lived alone the last thirty years of her life. For many of those years she had given up her car and got to different places through different means. Sometimes she took the bus. Sometimes friends would drive her. When I was not at work and especially the last ten, twenty years, I would drive her to where she needed to go. And sometimes she walked. Every day after work I would drive from work to Mom’s house to see if she needed anything. One day I got there and she left a note that she had walked up the pike to the drug store. I got back in my car and drove up the pike and saw her walking on the sidewalk on the way back home. I made a u-turn as fast as I was able and as I watched her walking, I observed how the arthritis had slowed her down. Each step was an effort but she kept moving. I caught up with her and she got in my car. She was glad that I picked her up and I said, “Mom, I know your arthritis is bad. How are you able to walk all the way up to the CVS and back?” She said, “I just put one foot in front of the other and just keep going.”

Your Focus

Yes — absolutely yes — you may have a long distance to travel. You may have a long way to go in whatever you are doing, but you can get there by taking steps…consistent actions … consistent effort … every day … one step, then another, then another, and so on. Focus on each step, not on the distance. Your focus is your vision. Your focus proves your intention. Your focus strengthens your faith. Your focus is sharpened by your gratitude. Every step you take brings you another step closer to your destination. The armies of Alexander the Great conquered much of the known world traversing 22,000 miles over twelve years from Greece to India and back to Babylon…..one step at a time. I recently viewed an internet video of an elderly man mightily struggling to carry a case of water up a flight of stairs at an apartment complex. The video was taken at the time without his knowledge. He was a man in his sixties working a delivery job to make ends meet. He had some stroke residuals and you could observe that each step up the stairs was a struggle. He used the wall next to the steps as kind of a brace. He just contined to focus on one step at a time until he reached the top. As it turned out, the person who took the video subsequently spoke with the man and a gofundme campaign was started for him with wonderful results. The funding he received meant he would not have to struggle with delivering cases of water up flights of steps anymore. All emanating from the man just focusing on putting one foot in front of the other.

Stick With It

Many of the things that have been mentioned in previous posts are not easy. While they may sound simple, they require hard work and discipline. The concepts are definitely not for you if you wish to merely dabble in the manifesting process and will bail out when results are not forthcoming according to the time schedule that you want. The concepts won’t work if you constantly take days off. The concepts won’t work if you doubt. You must stick with it — one foot in front of the other — until the results are achieved. Adjust your focus and your attention to putting one foot in front of the other in whatever it is that you are doing. That is what is eventually going to get it done for you no matter what the deal is that you are working on.

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Tell Rostov, It’s Time To Die

Invasion USA

In 1988, a movie was made featuring Chuck Norris titled, “Invasion USA”. The gist of the movie involved Chuck single-handedly saving the USA from an army of saboteurs who had silently invaded the country. The arch villian and the leader of the saboteur army in the movie is a man called Rostov played by perpetual movie villian Richard Lynch. In the movie there are two lines of dialogue that one tends to remember. The first involves Chuck telling one of Rostov’s minions that he better tell Chuck what he wants to know or “I’ll hit you with so many rights, you’ll be begging for a left.” The second is a line that Chuck uses a few times in the movie directed at the leader of the army — “Tell Rostov, it’s time to die.”

Tell Rostov It’s Time To Die

I thought about using an image from that film for this blog but due to possible copyright issues, I decided to stick with an available free image. If, however, you wish to view the climatic image from that movie where Chuck tells Rostov in person that it is time for Rostov to die, just conduct a google search, “invasion usa it’s time to die”, then hit “images” after you get your search results. In that image, you will see Chuck standing about twenty feet behind the villian. They both have portable rocket launchers. The villian has been stalking Chuck to kill him. All of a sudden, from behind, the villian hears Chuck load the missile launcher and say to the villian, “It’s time to die”. The look on the face of the villian says it all. He knows that he is totally screwed and Chuck has beaten him. The villian attempts to turn around and kill Chuck but Chuck shoots first and the villian winds up in a million pieces.

Reject Fear

In your life, you have a Rostov stalking you. He is called Fear. Fear of failure. Fear of poor health. Fear of loneliness. Fear of being useless. Fear of being unloved. Fear of enslavement to poor health or poor finances. Fear of not having your life mean something. Fear of not getting your fair share of things in life. Fear of this. Fear of that. Fear. Fear. Fear. Just as Rostov stalked Chuck in the movie, fear is always stalking you. To be successful in manifesting the life you desire, you also must tell fear that “It’s time to die”. Use appropriate manifesting techniques and earnest prayer to use your own inner rocket launcher to blow fear into a million different pieces.

There Are Two Root Emotions

In the image above, Edvard Munch’s impressionist painting “The Scream” epitomizes how it feels for a person to be in the grips of fear. To live in fear is a type of nightmare. Someone once said that there are only two root emotions from which all other emotions spring — love and fear. Love is truth. Fear is error. Make the choice as best as you can in your precious life to choose love. Fear will always take you down a one way street to nowhere.

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Dress For Success — How You Dress Affects Your Life

As you can see from the above image, the man using the snowblower has dressed himself in a manner that will allow him to successfully achieve his objective — clearing a specific area of snow. Coat, hood, hat, goggles, ear mufflers, gloves. He has dressed himself in such a way that he can continue continuously working in a frigid environment until the area that he wishes to be cleared is done. Flip-flops, cut-off shorts and a summer Hawaiian shirt are not going to get it done for him. With that type of get-up he may suffer some type of negative physical effects due to exposure to the below-freezing cold. Or he will be back inside the house every few minutes to get warm thus making the job a never ending affair. Or after a few minutes in the freezing cold, he may decide just to forego clearing the area of snow and give up.

Dress For Success

In the world of manifesting whatever it is that you want in this world, you must likewise dress for success. Many get dressed each day in their clown suit, putting on a shirt of frustration, pants of anger, a belt made of all manner of different fears, shoes permeated with doubts and and top it off with a hat soaked in bitterness. Life just seems to be one long never-ending struggle with momentary flashes of happiness. One problem gets solved and two more show up at your door to bedevil and harass you. It doesn’t have to be that way. It doesn’t. If you dress yourself properly, your life can be good, even in the midst of having to deal with problems. The man in the image above still has to deal with the raw cold and snow. It doesn’t magically go away but he is dressed in such a manner so as to allow him to be completely successful in dealing with the snow and cold.

How You Dress Each Day Is Up To You

So just how do you dress for success? This has nothing to do with wearing expensive Armani suits or Gucci leather shoes. It has everything to do with how you attire your inner self each day, each hour, each minute. It has to do with what inner clothes you choose to put on every day. Put on the shirt of the crystal clear vision of your objective. Make it vivid, not foggy or squishy. See every part of your vision from every angle. Know it as well as you know the “proverbial back of your hand.” Next, put on the pants of your intention. Know your purpose. Once you have strongly decided on your vision, let your “pants of intention” walk only along those paths that lead you to fulfillment of your vision. Refrain from turning to the left. Refrain from turning to the right. Let those pants lead you directly to making your vision your reality. Thirdly, hold up your pants with the belt of faith — strength of belief that will keep your pants from falling to the ground. Strength of belief that you would not have this vision and intention unless it was completely fulfillable. Finally, wear the shoes of your gratitude — true gratitude that there was nothing on earth that was able to prevent you from manifesting your vision, fulfilling your intention and justifying your faith. You do not have to pay a fortune for Armani suits and Gucci shoes in order to dress for success. Getting dressed with true power clothes — vision, intention, faith, gratitude — is totally free. You do not have to spend so much as a penny but you do have to put in some hard work. You can choose to dress for failure or you can choose to dress for success. How you dress each day is totally up to you. What type of clothes are you choosing to put on today?