The Billboard and the Ocean

From an address to the Palm Beach Diocese Southern Deanery Conference of Catholic Women, November 19, 2023

There's a billboard on Atlantic Avenue in Delray Beach. The way the Billboard is placed, with the trees in front of it when you're driving West, it says “Pray God listens.” When you get closer, you realize that you were missing the punctuation mark. The billboard actually reads “Pray. God listens.” That’s quite a different message, isn't it?

Thursday night, I drove from Delray Beach to West Palm Beach. Usually, if I’m doing that trip at 5:00 PM, I take A1A. The speed limit may only be thirty-five, but there's no traffic and few lights, so it's a steady 35-40 all the way up. It ends up taking me just about the same time as it would on 95, but it's a much nicer ride.

When I take that route, I have the ocean in view at various times during the ride. Thursday, the ocean was wild. Waves were coming in fast and furious, much to the delight of some surfboarders making their way to Boynton inlet. I was watching the ocean coming into shore. The ocean was roiling, angry, waves crashing into the shore. I’ve never stood at the shoreline when a hurricane was blowing in, but this was the roughest I’ve ever seen.

There are points on that drive where the island is not wide, where you are driving along the intracoastal. The intracoastal, especially in contrast to the ocean, was calm. Sure if you looked closely, you could see little ripples across the top as the waves pushed the water along but, for the most part, the intercostal was as calm as the Ocean side was wild.

And that's really the story of the two different readings of the billboard, too, isn't it? When we pray without faith, we pray that God listens, that somehow, some way, he might maybe hear us. We wonder if God listens, and our motions are in turmoil. Our emotions are like that ocean, crashing around, making progress, but expending a lot of energy to do it. There’s no peace, no tranquility in us, just crashing around, perhaps even angry, just like that wild ocean.

But when we come to prayer from a place of faith, we know that when we pray, God listens. Our emotions are like the intracoastal: serene and calm. Even when our prayer revolves around our anxiety, in our faith, we pray with a few little ripples, not crashing waves. When we pray in faith, we're praying with the knowledge that God answers our prayers. Sure, the answer might not always be what we want but we know God hears us.

In my Thursday night class - I'm teaching Christian Spirituality at Holy Name of Jesus - one of my students said that he had been praying for over six years for something. He’s still praying for it and he's starting to get discouraged. I acknowledged that that's a hard place to be in. It's tough when our prayers aren't answered immediately, never mind after years of praying for the same thing. I don't know what it is that he's praying for, but I do know that he's feeling discouraged and abandoned because his prayer hasn't been answered the way he wants it to be answered.

Yet my advice to him was to keep praying. However I suggested he change his prayer: stop asking for the thing you've been asking for. Instead, ask God for the wisdom and understanding to accept His will whatever His answer may be.

At first, my student didn’t like that answer. Why was I telling him to stop asking the same thing he had been asking for six years?

There are three possible answers to prayer. God says yes; God says not just yet; God says I have something better in mind. I wasn’t suggesting that my student was wrong in his prayer, but that he needed to take God’s will into account.

Whatever it is that you're praying for, if that prayer is not being answered, even if (maybe even especially if) it’s something you truly desire, you need to stop and think about why God is not saying yes, as fast as you want Him to. But we know that our desires do not, should not, be to overcome God's will. My student had been praying for the same thing for six years and nothing changed. Rather than continuing to pray for that which you desire, ask instead to be content with that which you have.

It's a hard message to be sure. Who among us doesn't wish that some prayer had been answered differently? I’ve taught second graders living in a third-floor walkup apartment who felt that praying for a pony was a prayer God should answer yes to. Some of our prayers may be just as impractical, at least to God, who knows all that we don’t.

Seven years ago, my prayer was for my husband not to die. When I could look at it practically, non-emotionally, I knew death for him would be a release from an illness that had chipped away at his independence and quality of life. But when I thought of me, my emotions took over. Looking back now, seven years later, I can also see my prayer for his life to be longer was so very selfish: I thought more of my own emotional pain than I did of my husband’s rapidly approaching sight of God. As much as it pained me to lose him, I have to recognize that my prayer for him to remain was really a prayer “to stay with me, don't go to God.”

When you put it like that, it's a totally different thing, isn't it?

I'm not saying that we should never pray for someone to be cured of a disease. I'm just saying that we should put God's will first and our prayers always should include in some form those words from the Our Father: “thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

Your will, God, not mine. My will is selfish. It’s what I want. In my humanity, I’m taking my point of view and making it the only one. But God sees more than I see. God knows more than I know

I want my prayer to be the prayer of the intercoastal, not of the ocean. I want my prayer to come from a place of peace inside of me. If in prayer I place myself in the presence of God, as I should, I should be in a place of peace. Sure, I’m human; sure I'm earthbound: I have cares, desires, wants, needs. But in the presence of God, I ought to be serene and calm.

I'm not suggesting that we shouldn’t take our cares and worries and tears and fears to God. I'm just saying that when we're in His presence, our soul is at rest,

To give ourselves to God wholeheartedly is to open ourselves to his will. Praying for our needs and desires is not a bad thing, just so long as we remember that our needs and our desires are not as important as what God wants from us.