Chapter Four: The Danger of Unrealistic Expectations (June 1999 to March 2000)
One of the first things Belinda told me after we got back in touch was that she was
now obsessed with becoming not a lawyer or an FBI agent, but a doctor. Said she was
“overwhelmed” by a desire to heal others, and was taking required pre-med courses. Plus,
she said school was “challenging and exhilarating” for the first time in her life. And that she
felt content for the first time in her life. Wow! I thanked God for granting my hundreds of
petitions for her growth.
Over the next few months, Belinda and I emailed back and forth a lot. I remember
bring surprised at the sheer volume of writing she did about her various problems, and
how deeply they seemed to affect her, but of course I was glad to serve as a sounding
board. Everything, I thought, was going according to God’s plan.
In fact, these emails of Belinda’s were so open and intimate, it seemed to confirm my
supposition that she wanted us to get romantic again. And look what was coming up on
the calendar—the most romantic evening of all, the millennial New Year’s Eve. It would be
so perfect if Belinda and I could finally see each other in person then. By that time, we’d
have been email pals for five or six months, and I had definitely been her platonic friend, as
per God’s challenge, all that time. The dawn of the year 2000 must be the setting he had in
mind for our romantic reunion!
So, although I didn’t word my invitation quite that explicitly, I did write Belinda
sometime in November and tell her how much I’d like us to get together on that special
night.
Then, of course, I tried to ask God to make the hot date become a reality, but for
some reason I wasn’t able to get any faith going at all.
One thing I did to try to deal with this failure was to read up on the subject of “type
psychology,” which looks at different personality types and the ways they interact. From a
book called Type Talk by Otto Kroeger and Janet Thuesen, I learned that the most
important trait by which personalities differ is introversion versus extroversion. Belinda
was definitely a strong introvert—which, I learned, meant that interaction with others,
especially talkative others like me, very likely exhausted her.
So, though it was hard for me to understand, it was a fact that introverts could
genuinely like somebody yet not always feel like talking to that person. In fact, the person
they genuinely like may be extra stressful for them to talk to, since real communication
may be more likely to occur. What a valuable tutorial for God to have sent me about
Belinda!
The underlying lesson here should’ve been that when I focused on learning about
Belinda as a separate human being instead of spinning my fantasy about the romance, God
provided the educational experiences I needed. But at the time, I didn’t think about that
because I didn’t want to give up my quest for the New Year’s Eve date.
During this same period, several things happened that made me see the shortcomings
of my spiritual state at that point in time.
One of these was a fight I got into with one of Mama’s sitters, Georgia. Georgia’s
heart was in the right place, but she had a bad temper (as I did), so when you put both of
us together, anything could happen.
This time, we were arguing over some detail of the work schedule, and I got so mad
that I kicked the hell out of a rather nice metal trash can my sister-in-law had découpaged
for Mama many Christmases before. Georgia then sprung up from her chair, tapping her
shoulder repeatedly and saying, “Hit me! Come on! Hit me!”
Fortunately, I didn’t, but we continued to yell at each other as Georgia picked up her
things and started for the back door, quitting the job, at least for that day. I followed her
and slammed the door as hard as I could after she had stormed through it.
This was not the kind of person I wanted to be! What was more, it was totally
opposite the forgiving I knew I had to do if I wanted God to grant my petitions to the
fullest extent possible.
(The transformations God wants us to make before he’ll answer our prayers aren’t
always specifically related to what we’re asking God to do for us. Any way we’re failing
to forgive is going to make God that much less likely to deliver. So, as long as I didn’t
repent of my anger toward Georgia, it would be an obstacle to God’s granting my petitions
about Belinda as well as about everything else.)
Also, I now saw, for the first time, that it was my choice whether or not to ask God
to change my heart and remove my anger. Before, I had always said my temper was
something I couldn’t control. That was true on one level, but on another level, I could turn
it over to God and let him do what he wanted with it.
I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to keep on raging. But God was definitely
challenging me to take this fundamental spiritual step.
I can’t think of a single truth more important than this one, namely that God can
change the things we can’t change about ourselves if we ask him and let him.
Here, I could get preachy and say something like “it’s our responsibility as mature
adults to deal with our faults in this manner,” but for the purposes of this book, the more
relevant fact is that dealing with our faults is the only way we can qualify ourselves for the
most complete granting of our petitions. It’s a cut-and-dried case of smart selfishness.
Back to the subject of the New Year’s invitation. Belinda not only hadn’t answered,
but also had weirdly and inexplicitly clammed up and stopped writing altogether. What was
going on?
I thought hard about everything God had already made happen between Belinda and
me, from her being in my section of Freshman Comp to begin with to her getting back in
touch with me this year. It sure did seem like Belinda and I were meant to go somewhere
rather than nowhere. Think of all the good that could potentially come from it. We both
had such high ideals and forceful personalities, it just seemed like we could do more good
for the world if we were close than if we weren’t. Yes, it most likely was part of God’s
big plan, as long as we humans didn’t screw it up.
In that hopeful frame of mind, I was able to see that maybe, just maybe, Belinda was
nervous about seeing me face to face, even though she had written all those long emails.
So I wrote an email saying she didn’t have to worry about me becoming romantic or
pushing the conversation toward her personal stuff if she didn’t want to talk about it. I said
I could be less intense if I needed to. I didn’t know if this was going to help or not, but
writing it made me feel even more hopeful.
As soon as I hit Send, though, I got confused again. I tried to pray that Belinda
would like my message, say YES to the invitation, and we’d go out and have a good time—
on any basis, romantic or otherwise—but I still couldn’t get any faith going at all.
One complication was that I wasn’t sure I was really OK with the nonromantic
possibility. Was I going to be disappointed if that happened, and have to hide my
disappointment? My mind was hyperactive with all these thoughts. It was impossible to
calm down or Act as If.
My problem was that I was about to run out of outs for God.
Back in September, I’d asked Belinda to lunch and she’d said she didn’t have time,
and that we’d have to wait till the semester was over in December—and that had been fine.
I was able to have faith that God would let us get together when the time was right. But
now, it was (early) December, and she hadn’t answered my NYE invitation. Pretty soon, if
she still didn't want to see me, I was going to have to face up to that fact.
Around the tenth of December, I made a list of petitioning tips for when time seems
to be running out, as it seemed to be running out on me then. These had all worked for me
in the past, such as when I landed that first assistantship in my master’s program. Most of
them have to do with the fact that in this situation, there’s nothing more important than
staying in a faithful mood, as much as you possibly can.
1. Force yourself to Act as If, EVEN IF you're completely pretending.
To try to explain how I do this—well, a lot of it is simply pretending, that is, not allowing
negative thoughts any breathing room in my mind. You don’t have to go out and make a
fool of yourself, but do imagine your wishes coming true, and don’t let yourself imagine
them not coming true. Logically, this leads to feeling happy and thankful in advance of
actually getting what you’re praying for—which, when you think about it, is a pretty good
frame of mind to be in.
2. Use what little faith you have to ask God to restore your faith.
3. Ask God to make sure you're strong enough to accept a NO answer, but also to help you
believe that he'll do all he can (within the big plan, that is) to bring about a YES.
4. Remind yourself that God WANTS you to believe: "Without faith it is impossible to
please God" (Hebrews 11).
5. Sing hymns or Christmas carols or anything else that gets you in a faithful mood; it's
OK to play these kinds of tricks on your mind.
I believe that anything like music or poetry or anything else that makes us feel uplifted is
part of the word of God. So just sing or recite whatever pieces hit the spot for you,
whether or not they’re explicitly religious. Walter Ong, a Jesuit priest and philosopher of
language, wrote about the relation between spirit, breath, and speech; his belief that spoken
words are alive and connected to God in a way that written ones are not would be
pertinent here. (Sorry I can’t recall the exact quote.)
For me at this particular time, though, none of these techniques seemed even worth
trying. Looking back, I know this was because I knew in my heart of hearts (though not in
my conscious mind) that what I was asking God to do was unrealistic, at least the way I
was imagining it. My ideas about New Year’s and romance were totally self-centered,
having nothing to do with anything Belinda had said in her writings, apart from the mere
fact that she had been so open and candid when talking about her problems. (They also
had nothing to do with anyone’s spiritual growth, including my own.)
However, it’s still a good list! The desperation I was feeling helped me get right to
the point, no beating around the bush. So, take note, but remember that these methods
work only if you’ve determined, by paying attention to God, your conscience, and other
people, that what you’re asking for is realistically possible.
A day or two later, God sent me another one of those big lessons about where my
focus ought to be. I was planning to drive down to Baton Rouge to take a couple of my
classmates out to lunch to celebrate their graduation, but I wanted to see Belinda while I
was down there, and I couldn’t decide what to do if I still hadn’t heard from her when the
day arrived. It made me mad that John and Sylvia were available to me but Belinda (the
most important one, in my view) was not. Maybe I just wouldn’t make the trip at all.
(Have you ever considered doing anything stupid like that because of your romantic
feelings?)
While agonizing over what to do, I suddenly realized that—duh!—I could ask God to
help with this decision also, just as much as I could ask him to have Belinda say yes for
New Year’s. And as soon as I sent up that prayer, I knew God’s answer instantly: I should
make the trip even if I didn’t hear from Belinda at all.
Well, that turned out to be exactly what happened—and God underscored his answer
by making the day into one of those incredibly perfect ones that come around only every
now and then, and frequently when we least expect them.
To start with, the weather was heavenly—one of those crisp, sunny winter days with
sky too blue to be believed, when it feels good just to be outside, or even just to look out
the window at the sunshine. I picked John and Sylvia up in my new car, a speedy little VW
Jetta, which John had a great time driving. We hit our favorite Lebanese restaurant for a
late lunch, where we got silly acting like “doctors,” which we all now technically were.
Then we did some Christmas window shopping at a nearby strip mall (the better to soak
up more of the sunshine), and finally went back to John’s place to play with his new dog,
a toy terrier named Turbo, who lived up to her name, tirelessly racing around chasing toys,
sticks, and anything else we humans could find to throw for her. The whole three hours
was unbelievably fun and carefree.
During my drive home that evening, God caused me to recall the challenge I had
accepted that night in April, to be Belinda's friend with no romance, and to understand this
day as part of the fulfillment of that plan, because it had taught me the value of socializing
with others instead of sitting around feeling sorry for myself because she wasn’t available.
I should have kept on listening to God instead of trying to make things happen on my
own, but alas, my human nature kicked in. The very next morning I had the nerve to feel
mad as hell at God. Dammit, I wrote, I'm SO tired of longing for Belinda to write. At that
point, I should have done whatever I had to do to let go of that anger and get into a sincere
petitioning dialogue with God.
But, just as with my anger when I had had that fight with Georgia, I didn’t want to
let go of the anger. I wanted to keep on raging. But since this case had to do with
something I personally cared about so much (Belinda), I did know right away that I had to
give it up if I wanted God to help. At first, I still didn’t take that step wholeheartedly, but at
least I didn’t keep on raging. What I did was kind of in-between: I sort of half-assedly
asked God to help me do better, and then put the whole thing out of my mind.
A couple of days later, I again wrote angrily in my journal. God, I'll grow and learn
from other problems, but not THIS one [i.e., Belinda’s silence]! Please just take it away!
But when I stopped and thought about it—again motivated by the fact that this was
something I cared about personally (Belinda)—I saw that this was exactly the attitude I
needed to guard against. The problems we dislike the most are usually the very ones whose
lessons we most need to learn.
A good insight, but it was two more days before I actually tried to put it into
practice. Then, I thought deeply about my situation:
12-17-99: Peck says we go through Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's stages of death (denial, anger,
bargaining, depression, acceptance) with regard to any habit we're forced to give up. This
is just what I’ve been doing with my hope that Belinda and I will get back together
romantically. I’ve been in denial for months now about what God was implying when he
asked me if I was willing to be platonic friends with her: that that was going to be the
state of our relationship for a significant amount of time. At first I was all fired up about
meeting the no-romance challenge, but then as soon as I actually heard from her, I not
only forgot all about it but also went to ridiculous lengths to achieve exactly the opposite,
even to the point of buying a New Year's Eve party outfit—dark navy pantsuit with a touch
of glitter—for our nonexistent dinner date.
I also realized that—duh again!—my forgetting the Friend lesson pretty much had to
be a major reason for Belinda’s silence. Even though I hadn’t said anything explicit about
romance in my invitation or other emails, she had to have been able to sense where I was
coming from. Man, had I set myself up for all this disappointment!
The only thing to do now was work myself out of my denial. I humbly asked God to
help.
I then spent the next few days praying hard and listening to God about the whole
situation. One thing I learned was that being Belinda’s platonic friend meant truly accepting
that the romance might never rekindle. Another thing I learned was that it was OK for me
to continue to hope from a distance that all of this was just a good long prelude to a wildly
passionate love affair, but only as long as my expectations were based on a realistic
understanding of the way things actually stood at the moment. Have you ever been in such
a position yourself? It was clear what I needed to do.
On Christmas Day, I decided to put into practice the insight about basing my
expectations on the reality before me by tackling the nine long emails Belinda had written in
the past few months. I was determined to read them as objectively as possible, instead of
interpreting them according to my wishes, as I now realized I had done the first time I had
read them. I didn’t like the idea of revisiting the past—I mean not the distant past she
talked about in the emails but the past in the sense that the emails themselves were now in
the past—but I decided I was willing to do it because I wanted so badly to figure out what
had happened.
Well, starting about ten seconds into my reading, I felt like I was being bombarded
by missiles! Page after page, Belinda wrote about her pain from her obsession with the
near-psychotic Audra. For example, recalling the last time they had seen each other, she
described herself as “spellbound” by Audra’s eyes, which were “blue like the barrel of a
gun, threatening and adoring all at once.”
The first time I had read this material, I had chalked it up to youthful exaggeration, as
well as to drugs, which Belinda had said she had a “voracious” appetite for. I had also
thought that that appetite explained her strong feelings for Audra, who had been drug
buddy as well as lover. All Belinda needed, I thought, was a few months of wholesome
love from me, and both Audra and the drugs would fade into the background forever.
Now that I was forcing myself to take what Belinda had written at face value, I was
so overwhelmed that I had to get up and walk away from my computer for a few minutes.
“HELP!” I shouted to God. “Give me strength to withstand all this darkness!”
I also asked him to help me keep on reading, because I wanted to know the truth no
matter how bad it was. Thinking about how excited I had been about the question from the
sky that night back in April helped me keep the faith that that same being would protect me
now.
After diving back into the emails, I realized that although I simply could not fathom
how Belinda could feel so devoted to someone she viewed as a “bad seed,” this was
nevertheless a stated fact that I had to acknowledge if I was so determined to be her friend.
Since I was still trying to figure out the exact reason for Belinda’s current silence, I
wondered if maybe she was back with Audra but was embarrassed to tell me. So I decided
to write her that it was OK to tell me that, because we were friends and all I wanted was
for our friendship to continue. I asked God to help me know what else to do, and also to
help her, because I saw she needed it more than I did.
The realization that I needed to approach Belinda in terms of friendship rather than
romance took root and grew because it was the truth God had been waiting for me to get
through my head. (I know it was dumb of me to take so long to get it, but I also think a lot
of people could make the same mistake.) (Could you, maybe?) Now that I was listening to
God again, I soon started to feel as close to him as I had when Belinda had first started
writing me in the summer.
I think this position of closeness to God is the same feeling we get when we simply
start listening to our consciences instead of resisting them because we don’t want to do
what they’re telling us. In any case, from the position, I was able to take a few minutes
several times a day to work on turning my romantic fantasies over to God.
Using the technique of many deep breaths and sighs, I asked God to do whatever she
or he wanted with my feelings, although I did hope that wouldn’t mean taking the romantic
feelings away forever. Whenever I did this “letting go and letting God,” waves of relaxation
would sweep through my body, leaving me both mentally and physically humble in the
presence of the Creator. What a feeling of finally getting it right. (My relationship to God,
that is.)
Here, it’s important to note that I had to keep going back and doing this work again
and again. We humans make our transformations only in bits and pieces, with plenty of
reverting to old habits in between. So, whenever that happens to you, just remember, it
happens to everybody. And that all you have to do is pick up the pieces and start your
spiritual work again.
You probably won’t have to start all over, either; rather, it’s kind of a two-steps-
forward/ one-step-back type of process. And God is always ready to take us back as soon
as we’re ready to come back to her or him (instead of trying to accomplish things by our
own power!).
One way God underscored the correctness of my project of letting God reorder my
mind was to send me a sign via a TV character—and not just any character, but one
Belinda herself had introduced me to. In an X-Files rerun I happened to catch a snippet of,
Belinda’s former role model of an FBI agent, the character Dana Scully, told her co-
worker and would-be romantic partner Mulder that the best love developed out of
friendship, when a light suddenly came on that signaled the beginning of romantic feelings
in the midst of friendship.
I got a kick out of God’s artistry in using everything at his disposal (which is
everything) to send me this sign. It seemed to confirm that Belinda and I were meant to be,
in one form or another, if I could just get my act together.
Digging deeper, I realized that Scully’s statement implied that both people were
nothing but friends before the light came on.
Wow. While I supposed I could still hold onto my distant hope for romance, it really
was going to have to be distant. The way it was right now, even though I had accepted the
possibility that the romance might never rekindle, I was going to have to change a lot more
before I was honestly nothing but friends with Belinda.
I had already struggled many times with this issue, trying to make deals with God
whereby I could function as Belinda’s platonic buddy but at the same time retain my
romantic interest in her. (Bargaining is another of Kübler-Ross’s stages of death.) With
Scully’s message, God was reminding me that the bargaining didn’t work, and that my
work of letting him change my feelings was not yet finished.
Suddenly something else was also clear: my previous "praying" for the New Year’s
Eve date—it now seemed blasphemous to use that word without quotes—had been not
only hopeless and self-centered but also downright inconsiderate of Belinda’s very
personhood. I hadn’t simply ignored what she had been saying; I had also failed to treat
her with the dignity she deserved. My project of trying to get her to say yes to the date had
been nothing but one big insult, especially since she had been confiding in me so deeply!
The entire New Year’s Eve debacle is a perfect illustration of the basic truth that we
simply must base our requests on reality as best we can perceive it at the time, as well as
of the human tendency not to do that but instead to see things our own way, however
distorted that may be. If we go so far as to ask God to send us the unrealistic things (as I
did), we’ll find it impossible to cultivate faith that God’s going to deliver.
This, in turn, will affect our whole relationship with him or her, including our ability
to petition about everything else. As long as we cling to our unrealistic prayers, we’ll be
cutting ourselves off from the source of being. We may survive but we won’t prosper, at
least not spiritually.
In early January, I spent a good bit of time just trying to get back into my normal
back-and-forth dialogue with God. (The holidays, with their hoopla, aren’t a very good
time for prayer.)
As far as Belinda went, in some moods (as time went on) I came close to losing my
faith altogether and concluding that I had blown it, ending our new friendship forever. But
when I reminded myself that it made sense for me to hope there was a future for me and
Belinda, I saw that rather than “getting the message,” what I was supposed to do was
work on making the very simple—but also very difficult—leap of faith to where I believed
that God had more in store for us if I would just be open to his plan. It was up to me to
make that leap.
The petitioning truth here is that there’s a point in every petitioning process when you
simply have to make this mental jump over the chasm that separates faith and doubt. You
have to make a conscious effort not to do what Peter did when he started out walking on
the water toward Jesus, but then got scared and sank. Luckily, God will help us with our
leaps. We just have to ask him!
Another thing I realized during this time was that whenever I asked God to help
Belinda, I needed to ask not only for her growth and healing, but also specifically for her
healing of her pain over Audra. Doing this forced me to remember how important Audra
was to Belinda, instead of ignoring that fact as I had done in the past. This automatically
made me into a better confidante (assuming Belinda was ever going to confide in me
again), thus generating part of God’s answer to my request to be made into the friend she
needed.
As it turned out, my empathy did improve and Belinda did end up making use of it, as
she went on over the next couple of years to write many more tortured emails in the
process of getting Audra out of her system. Sometimes I needed to give myself a pep talk
in order to keep on reading them and trying to respond appropriately. At those times, I’d
remind myself that the whole thing was part of why God wanted Belinda and me to be
friends to begin with. That made it much easier to simply suck it up and do the best I
could.
While Belinda’s healing might have taken place eventually even if I hadn’t prayed
about it, my own growth and the growth of our friendship would never have happened on
their own. They were the direct result of changes I had—to use Deepak Chopra’s
wonderful expression— “cooperated with God” to make in myself, for the purpose of
qualifying for my petitions to be granted. (Isn’t it marvelous that while we’re living in this
world of dissolution and destruction, we have available to us none other than the creator of
the universe to help us deal with it?)
One last spiritual lesson I learned around this time was that if I wanted to put myself
into a good enough mood to where I could dive into whatever spiritual work I needed to
do, it often worked simply to do things that gave me pleasure. So it seems we have not
only a right but also a duty to do things that bring us real enjoyment. (How nice of God to
make it like that.)
Even TV can serve this purpose, if it’s stuff we truly like. At this time, Friends was
one show that did it for me—although it never occurred to me that its title could also have
been the name of my project for my relationship with Belinda.
For about three weeks beginning in late January, I suffered from what theologians
call a Dark Night of the Soul. This surprised me. I was naïve enough to think my recent
spiritual progress meant I was immune to things like this.
If you’re not familiar with the term, the best way I can describe the Dark Night is to
say that it’s a distinctively spiritual type of depression. It’s as though God is suddenly not
available anymore. For someone like me, who’s used to being able to find God within him-
or herself, and to connect to God effectively, to suddenly not be able to do that is pretty
bewildering. For me at least, it also makes any ordinary problem a million times worse,
since my normal way of solving any problem is to pray. For the same reason, there
seems to be no way out of the Dark Night, since my only way out of anything is via God.
Some people describe the Dark Night as the absence of God—as though God was
the one who moved—but for me it always feels like the fault clearly lies in me. It’s not that
God is gone or doesn’t exist, but that my mechanism for seeking him or her is closed
down, and I have no idea how to start it up again.
According to the original source of the term Dark Night of the Soul, the sixteenth-
century Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross, what I had was a relatively common
variety, the Dark Night of the Senses. God is purging the senses, St. John writes, in order
to show the soul its "lowliness and misery, which in the time of its prosperity it was unable
to see" (76-77). That makes sense to me—a stark reminder that we are nothing without
God!
Simple psychology can help us find our way out of a Dark Night, but at this time I
didn’t really know any that applied. The only other type of depression I’d ever experienced
was the Sunday blues, and I was learning to treat that by simply getting off my duff and
going out to interact with people, but it wasn’t until another Dark Night later on that I tried
the same technique with the Dark Night. It did help some, but only some.
I'm not sure exactly what it was that lifted me out of my present Dark Night. The
process always seems mysterious to me. Sometimes, all we can do is wait. “All moods
pass and this one will too” may be all we have to lean on.
One thing that did help jar me back into faith was that a huge ice storm almost hit my
city. A power outage was something I really didn’t want to happen, what with Mama’s
electric lift chair and hospital bed, as well as the thought of trying to explain to her what
was going on if everything suddenly went dark. So I tried my hardest to pray for the storm
not to hit our area, and it didn't. I was so thankful that I was then able to communicate
with God better than I had in weeks.
As I got back into a more normal routine of praying and listening to God, several
things happened to make me see still more changes I needed to make in myself if I wanted
to get my petitions granted as fully as possible. (Sorry if you were hoping the end was in
sight! But remember, these opportunities for growth in godliness are [in my view, anyway]
the purpose of life, so it makes sense that as long as we’re alive, we’re going to keep
getting them.)
The first thing happened when I was walking my neighbors’ dog. A new neighbor
was out mowing his grass, and while the dog and I were stopped in front of the yard next
to his, he left his mower, walked toward me, and said, “Would you please curb your dog,
Ma’am?” Well, this perfectly reasonable request ticked me off! So the next couple of times
I walked the dog down that block, I said out loud, “Hurry up, Peanut, be sure not to poop
in the mean guy’s yard!” I doubt anyone even heard me, but the point is that this childish
anger was my natural reaction.
Even back then, there was one situation where I had overcome this same type of
anger. When I was out running at night and a car would zoom by and nearly hit me, my
original response had been to jab my middle finger in the driver’s direction and to say
“Stupid son of a bitch!” But—I guess in an effort to keep from getting hit!—I had decided
to work prayerfully on this one, so that what came out naturally now was “Thanks, God,
for not letting the car hit me.” The dog-curbing incident made me see I needed to make
this same transformation in other situations as well.
The problem was that without any pressing motivation such as wanting to change
my attitude to a more forgiving one in order to clear God to protect me from getting hit by
a car, I simply didn’t want to stop being angry. I wanted to go right on gritting my teeth
and cursing the person till kingdom come. But since I was finally starting to get it that this
additional task of forgiving was also a requirement of God’s if he or she was going to
grant all my petitions to the fullest (those about Belinda as well as about everything else), I
made up my mind to get serious about the project of turning all my anger over to God.
What was more, I knew it was going to have to be God who did all this, not me.
Even though I was now willing to allow the change to be made, I knew part of me was
going to let go of that precious anger only with plenty of kicking and screaming. (Do you
know what I’m talking about? Do you sometimes like to wallow in your anger, too?)
Metaphorically speaking, what I needed to do was ask God to batter my heart, to
forcibly rip the anger away from me and put something else in its place.
Well, that phrase “batter my heart” just happens to be the first line of a Donne sonnet
about this exact problem. The speaker finds himself unwilling to turn his sin over to God. I
realized I could easily memorize the poem, and then call it up every time I needed to send
up the prayer myself:
Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me; and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town, t'another due,
Labor t'admit you, but oh, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain:
But am betroth'd unto your enemy:
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
Just to make sure we’re clear on everything—the speaker finally asks God not
merely to overthrow him but to “ravish” (i.e., rape) him.
Sometimes people take this poem to mean that the speaker’s talking about
temptations of the flesh that he can’t resist, but I think the word “heart” means he’s talking
mainly about sins of the spirit, like my anger. For me, these sins of the spirit are always
harder to overcome than sins of the flesh would be. I can usually change my behavior
simply by will power, but not my heart. Then, asking God to destroy (“break, blow,
burn”) my natural attitudes, and to “make me new” is the only thing that works.
Since the whole poem is only fourteen lines long, I realized I could easily memorize it
for use any time I needed it. The phrase “batter my heart” soon became a great shorthand
way of asking God to do this transforming of me whenever I’m not able or willing to do it
myself.
Digging deeper, the underlying truth of “Batter My Heart” is that no matter how
ingrained our anger or resentment may seem, we can make the choice to “let go and let
God” change it for us.
This, to me, is our basic challenge: whether we—these beings God created in God’s
image but with free will of their own—are going to choose to become progressively more
godlike, or not. We have chances, every day of our lives, to choose to grow in love and
selflessness, or to remain in the self- centered ways that come more naturally to us. “God
is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them,” says I John 4:
16, and I believe that the difficulties of life are there for the purpose of giving us plenty of
chances to choose to abide in this love.
When we do make these choices to align ourselves with God’s love, we’re qualifying
ourselves to have more and more of our petitions granted, since we’re making the changes
in ourselves that our difficulties were meant to coax us to make. As Jesus said in John 15:
7, if we abide in him, and his words abide in us, we can ask for whatever we wish and it
will be given to us.
If you’re wondering how you can let go of your anger or resentment enough to
where you can follow through with asking God to batter your heart and bring you around
to forgiveness— well, through trial and error, I found two methods that worked for me.
First of all, though, I nearly always have to do something—at least something small like
gritting my teeth or rolling my eyes—to vent the anger before I can release it. (If I need to
do something big, like yell and scream and hit the wall with my fists, then I make sure I’m
alone!)
After venting, I can use either of the methods I discovered around this time: one was
to simply relax my fighting mechanism, by taking deep breaths and then going limp, both
literally and figuratively, as I exhaled. The other was to examine my anger in detail—which
for some reason seems to help it dissipate—and then use the same relaxation technique.
Sometimes I had to do these exercises over and over, but eventually they did work to
disarm my anger. Then I could follow through with the Batter My Heart strategy.
One other fact I’ve learned about forgiveness before petitioning is that sometimes
what I have to do is forgive God for allowing the unwanted situation to begin with. Since
the whole purpose of life is for these types of situations to show us what we need to work
on in order to become godlike, then of course God isn’t doing a wrong that merits our
“forgiveness.” But that’s the way it feels sometimes.
What “forgiving God” amounts to is submitting our wills to the will of the universe,
so that instead of complaining about our lives from the standpoint of our limited vision, we
rest assured that the things we don’t like are there for a reason, and that God (who is love)
will help us deal with them if we ask him to.
Everyone accomplishes the task of submission to some extent as they mature—we
don't generally see adults throwing temper tantrums like three-year-olds—but Peck notes
(RLT3, 140) that most people don't succeed in letting go of their basic anger until
somewhere around age forty, and many people never do. (If it hadn’t been for wanting to
get my prayers answered, I may never have let go of mine.)
In any case, I think you’ll agree that the ultimate act of submission is asking God to
rape us! (That Donne—he had a way with words, didn’t he?)
Around this same time, I accidentally charged my VISA twice at the grocery store
and had to go back later and stand in the customer service line to get it fixed. Standing
there, I was actually mad because I felt like I was wasting my valuable time, even though
the whole thing was totally my fault. I didn’t pop off at anybody—that wasn’t my style—
but I did sigh and look annoyed for a few seconds, and I’m sure at least one or two people
heard me.
Later that night, all I could think about was how embarrassed I was to have acted
like that—and it’s very important to note that without this pain of embarrassment, I would
never have seen I needed to change. (As long as things go smoothly, we don’t learn
anything.)
As I thought about the prospect of asking God to make me into a more patient
person, though, my resistance kicked in. I didn’t necessarily want to become patient about
everything. I mean that was what made the world go round, wasn’t it—people who
wanted to get things done?
But when I really listened to God, I saw that even people with perfect godlike
patience could still be strong-willed and “impatient” when the situation truly called for it—
that is, when being impatient was the most loving thing to do. If I let God change my
underlying personality and make me more patient, I wouldn’t be giving up my strength of
will, just channeling it in more loving ways.
Also, if this change was going to mean I was more successful in getting my petitions
granted—well, how getting-things-done was that? It seemed clear that God wanted me to
say YES to this radical change in my personality.
There was one more nonloving, unforgiving habit I knew I needed to lose. (I’m
getting tired of me, too! But you want the whole truth, don’t you?) Anyway, I took
obsessive care of my health, and—for some reason—often despised people I thought didn't
take care of theirs. And at this time, there was this author, supposedly an alcoholic, who
hadn’t answered some letters I’d written him asking for advice. This guy had the
reputation of refusing to do anything about his drinking problem, and I faulted him for
that—as though we can ever know enough about another’s situation to criticize them for
their behavior. What an evil case of pride, both health pride and spiritual pride
combined!
As long as I was that full of hate, the alcoholic, with his undoubtedly greater humility
and compassion, was probably much better able to help others than I was.
When I recognized these glaring truths, I threw myself down on my knees and
begged God to make me a more patient and less prideful person. The kneeling position
helped me relax my fighting mechanism completely and take on an attitude of total
humility—both traits that were opposite the self-reliant determination I was used to
cultivating in myself. By praying hard, I was able to get into a mindset where my will was
completely submitted to God, yet I was also willing and ready to use my energy for
whatever God wanted me to do.
These spiritual events—this session as well as the earlier sessions regarding my
anger— marked the beginning of a neverending odyssey of self-improvement.
(Interestingly, as time went on, aggravating incidents seemed to happen less and less often,
no doubt because I no longer needed the lessons they had been designed to teach.)
Also interestingly, when you think about it, anger and impatience are just more cases
of unrealistic expectations. They’re also just more examples of how we need to learn to
submit our wills to the will of the universe.
I spent several weeks working sporadically on all these changes. But, though I didn’t
realize it at the time, I wasn’t really praying much at all. Then God made me literally
stumble upon some advice to myself from the past.
Moving some books around at home, I happened to open the composition textbook I
had taught from at LSU, and there inside the front cover was a yellow sticky note
engraved with Sara Anderson in bold letters (a long-forgotten stocking stuffer),
containing a list carefully hand-printed in capital letters, in my own handwriting:
PRAY & BELIEVE
RELAX
MAKE EYE CONTACT
REPEAT STUDENTS’ QUESTIONS
CUT TALK SHORT
EXPLAIN
LOOK AT LIST
How about that? What struck me wasn’t so much the words on the page, but the
way I had carried on my dialogue with God throughout the day—I mean even while events
were actually taking place. I couldn’t believe how far I had fallen out of the habit of asking
God for help all day long. And it surely had worked back then!
Of course, the reason I’d changed was because I wasn’t doing anything now that
caused me to need God’s help as urgently as teaching had. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t
try to get back in the habit of praying about everything I did. I cared about the current
stuff as much—at least the stuff about Belinda. It just wasn’t as urgent.
So what I did was make a point to send up my current prayers throughout the day,
several times every day. Every time, I made a conscious effort to submit my will, and then
I prayed hard for God to make me into the person he wanted me to be—both in the sense
of my losing my anger and in the sense of my becoming the most valuable friend possible
to Belinda.
Pretty soon, it dawned on me that maybe all this meant it wasn’t going to be too long
before I was ready for God to put Belinda back into my life. Cool!
My reaction to this awesome thought was to spontaneously send up one of the most
earthshaking prayers I’ve ever experienced. I dropped to my knees, humbling myself both
physically and spiritually the way I’d learned to do. Taking deep breaths and concentrating
as hard as I could on asking God to change me and letting him do so, I leaned back,
opening my arms to the heavens as I relaxed my grip on myself in great shudders of
emotional release. Suddenly, I felt physically lighter, freed from the shackles of my natural
personality. As I got to my feet, my heart fluttered with excitement, as though anything
was possible.
The next day, I listened hard to what God had to say about the changes I still needed
to make with regard to Belinda. What God said was that even though I had stopped my
romantic fantasies, I still constantly imagined things like deep conversations with her, and
our spending lots of time together as friends—and these imaginings, even though they
were platonic, were keeping me from becoming the best friend I could become, because I
was fantasizing about Belinda giving more to the friendship than she was actually likely to
give, especially at first.
Once again, I needed to learn to base my hopes and expectations on the reality in
front of me rather than on my wishes. I made up my mind to pray specifically about this at
least several times a day.
As for the basic lesson about petitioning more frequently for long-term, non-urgent
prayer projects—well, it may sound obvious, but it’s really not, I don’t think. I mean, are
you in the habit of praying intermittently all day long? I wasn’t!
I think the reason it works to do this is not simply that we keep on asking, but rather
that we have that many more chances to be alert to our lessons and growth.
And—by the way—another reason growth works as a way to get prayers answered
is because it causes our prayers to be more fully in Jesus’ name, which was another tip he
gave that we often ignore. “Until now you have not asked for anything in my name,” Jesus
said in John 16:24. “Ask and you will receive, so that your joy may be complete.” He
doesn’t explain what it means to ask in his name, but since he was all about love and
mercy, then I think it’s clear that whenever we grow to where our prayers are based more
on love and mercy than they were before, then we’re asking in his name where we weren't
before.
One example of my being more alert to my lessons and growth happened about a
week into my new effort to let God change my expectations about Belinda. What if, I
wondered as I was talking to God during one of my prayer sessions, I wrote her that it
was OK if we were email pals only, that we never saw each other at all?
But wait a minute! I was just brainstorming there! I didn’t think I was going to have
to go that far in giving up on a face-to-face relationship!
Could we possibly work out something, God, so that I could hang onto my desire that
Belinda’s and my communication not be limited to email only? I mean I can keep it to
myself, but please, I just want to still be able to hope we’re going to see each other, at
least every now and then. I get it that she probably won’t want to spend as much time with
me as I’d like to spend with her, but please, I just don’t want to give up that hope
altogether.
But of course I knew that this was just the type of bargaining I’d learned was not
going to work. If I was so determined to be nothing but friends with Belinda, then it was
clear that I had to be open to email-pals-only if that was what God had in store for us.
But this hurt! Have you ever been in a similar position yourself? It felt like I was just
giving up my love for Belinda. Just giving it up altogether. To agree never to see her at all if
that was what she wanted—it seemed absurd to have to do that after all I’d been through.
I mean all I’d been through with my lessons and growth!
What a mess in my brain! I dealt with it by typing as fast as I could into my journal
for two solid hours. (Whoever said writing helps us find out what we think about things
knew what they were talking about.)
What this journaling led me to see was that there was nothing I could do that would
amount to a hill of beans when stacked up against the creator of the universe. If he or she
or it knew it was best for me to make this change in my thinking, there was clearly no
argument I could make to the contrary. Talk about humbled!
Also, I now got as never before the cosmic truth that if I would simply turn my heart
and mind over to God, God would deal with my petitions in such a way that it would lead
to my greatest possible happiness and fulfillment, not to mention other people’s. All I had to
do to get this huge prize was to submit my will (by agreeing to the email-friends-only idea)
instead of trying to cling to my petty dreams (of wanting to see Belinda in person).
I tried my hardest to do this submitting, and then asked God to help me write the
message to Belinda about being email pals only. I was amazed at how easily it flowed.
After hitting Send, I dropped to my knees once again, begging God to help her take it
in the best possible way. I also asked him to send her the spiritual gifts I had recently
started asking him to send her: faith, hope, love, insight, healing, and joy—including, if
possible, a joyous desire for my friendship. The only difference between now and when I
had first made up the list was that now I had accepted that the friendship might only be an
email friendship.
The immature part of me still tried to complain, but I silenced it with, “Hell, Sara,
maybe this is what shy Belinda needs. So shut up and let God remake you into the patient,
undemanding person who can fill that bill!”
Over the next several days, I did more listening to God, trying to identify everything
else I needed to learn in order to clear him to grant my petitions about Belinda. But before I
get into those details, I think I should try to say something about how I do all this listening
to God. The reason I haven’t already talked about it is because it seems nearly impossible
to put into words. It’s easy to say you have to look within to find God, but it’s much
harder to say how to do it.
I think the best way to try to articulate this might be to talk about it in terms of
listening to our consciences, since most people seem to have a grasp of how they do that.
I think listening to God is basically the same thing, as long as our consciences aren’t
distorted by mental illness or emotional damage. I believe that as creatures, we all have the
seed of the Creator’s mind within us—and if God is love, then that means that whenever
we’re sincerely trying to determine how we can become more loving toward others, then
we’re thereby listening to God.
The only other tip I can come up with right now is that I frequently have to struggle
to clear my brain of whatever current nonloving attitudes may be in it, and also struggle to
make myself look at myself objectively, and also struggle to make myself listen to God
instead of remaining caught up in my shortsighted selfish desires—exactly like what I just
talked about when I didn’t want to give up my desire to start seeing Belinda in person. So,
the tip is that sometimes you have to really work hard to let go of your natural desires in
order to focus on what God is saying.
Lots of times it seems that simple complaints about reality are what keep people from
being able to look within and get in touch with God—I mean just whatever it is that a
person is prone to complain about. For example, I’ve always been prone to complain about
invasions of my time and my privacy. If I think I’m going to have some free time to focus
on my work, and then something comes up that threatens to get in the way of that, my
natural tendency is to say NO to whatever it is—and to complain about having the choice
in the first place—even though I know that sometimes at least, what I really ought to do is
to say yes. Like if somebody I don't know very well dies and I’m not sure whether I
ought to go to the funeral, my natural tendency is to complain about the fact that I’m even
faced with the possibility, instead of simply talking and listening to God about what I
should do. (Does this make sense? Do you have your own areas where you’re quick to
complain instead of opening yourself to what the God within you has to say?)
Now back to what else God had to teach me about Belinda. The main thing was that
I needed to come to terms with the fact that I was never going to be able to truly
understand many of the experiences that were most important to her, including (but not
limited to) her love/hate relationship with Audra. After my Christmas rereading of the
disturbing emails, I had done pretty well about accepting how important Audra was to her,
but this basic disconnect between our two minds was another matter altogether.
Toward the end of the passionate month, when Belinda had started acting cynical
some of the time, I had simply tuned out what she was saying when it wasn’t something I
could relate to. And recently, I had done the same thing again when she wrote all that dark
stuff about Audra. If I was so eager to become her true friend, I needed to start making a
point to remember that she and I were fundamentally different, and that there was a lot
about her that I was never going to really get the way I felt like I got some people. (I
finally understood why it was so important to learn to bracket out your own ideas, as Peck
taught, if you wanted to become a good listener.)
I now saw I had done the same thing all over again. I had been so thrilled that Belinda
had gotten back in touch with me that when she’d started writing things I couldn’t
connect with, I had simply ignored them—or practically so, anyway. If I was so eager to
become her true friend, I had to stop doing that! I also had to become consciously aware
of the fact that there was a lot about her that I was never going to be able to relate to. (I
finally understood why it was so important to learn to bracket out your own ideas, as Peck
taught, if you wanted to become a good listener.)
With this last making-my-expectations-more-realistic insight in mind, I sent up plenty
of prayers asking God to help me learn all these truths, and then to put Belinda back into
my life when I got to the point where I was ready for that to happen.
If you’re wondering how I could stay motivated to keep at this long prayer project—
well, it was because I still believed in Belinda’s potential as a human being, as well as in the
connection I thought she and I could have again whenever she decided to believe in that
potential herself.
Here, though, it’s important to note that I still had to psyche myself up repeatedly, by
reminding myself how badly I wanted to qualify for Belinda’s friendship. Keeping at the
prayers and the spiritual work of changing my perceptions and attitudes didn’t happen by
itself, not by any means. Seems to me it’s simply human nature not to stick to things like
this as well as we sometimes need to.
I was thrilled to discover, though, that maintaining real faith was much easier than it
had been to believe God was granting those unrealistic requests for the New Year’s date.
That’s because this time, I was positive my requests were in line with God’s will.
Since I knew I was doing what God (who is love) wanted me to do, I frequently found
myself capable of that ultra-vital faith that Mark 11:24 describes as believing God has
already granted our petitions. Exciting.
What was more, I started to realize I was infinitely happier with my modified
petitions and my transformed/transforming self than I ever would have been if my original
desires had been granted right off the bat. What an awesome surprise! (This was the
beginning of the part of the subtitle about “finding peace and joy.”)
What, though, about petitioning projects where we’re not able to believe God is going
to give us what we ask for? If we undertake transformations and still aren’t able to
maintain our faith, maybe we haven’t understood the assignment correctly—or maybe
what we’re asking God to do simply doesn’t fit into the big plan (either because it’s
unrealistic or for some other reason). The more we get in the habit of listening to God, the
better we’ll get at recognizing these situations and knowing when to change our goals or
strategies.
In my extended prayer dialogue with God about Belinda, what’s happened over the
years is that I’ve continually changed both myself and my requests as I become more and
more aware of what God wills for both of us. And as I write this, over a decade after the
time covered by this chapter, God has done incredible things in both Belinda’s and my lives
(as you’ll see as the story goes on), which I think shows that this whole approach works.
Toward the end of March, I suddenly realized I wasn’t praying as effectively
anymore. The problem was that before, when I crossed this certain busy street early in my
run, I had always been reminded of when Peanut and I had nearly gotten hit by a speeding
police car that was on a chase. I guess I just misestimated how fast it was going, but I’m
telling you, the tip of Peanut’s tail was brushed by the speeding car—or at least the rush of
wind from it really did brush Peanut’s tail. What this memory did for my praying ability
was that it put me into a mode of complete helplessness—the same position C. S. Lewis
was talking about when he said that true petitionary prayer begins when we say, "God, you
must do this, I can’t!” Now, I had changed my route and no longer crossed that street at
all, so there wasn’t anything to get me into that humble-begging frame of mind.
We humans aren’t inclined to do this; instead, we’re inclined to think about our
problems in a purely rational way—and that works for lots of problems, such as most of
the time when we have to cross streets. But it seems to me that if we really want to ask
God to help us, then we need to view ourselves as helpless in the face of the creator-
sustainer of the universe. We have to get completely away from our natural belief in our
ability to get things done on our own.
In between the begging and the purely rational thinking is thinking about our
problems in some kind of godly way, which is very easy to mistake for praying. I don’t
think there’s anything wrong with this if it’s truly in a godly way that we’re thinking
(which means in a loving way), but my experience has been that it hardly works at all as a
method of getting petitions granted.
You don’t have to be frightened—by dangerous traffic or anything else—in order to
achieve the humble-begging position. Like so many other petitioning methods, it’s a skill
you can work on and get better at.
For me, I find that the calmness and beauty of both the early morning and the late
night are good for helping me see the grandeur of creation, which helps me carry out the
command Be still and know that I am God. I look out the window at the wonders of the
universe, or up at the moon beaming in the starry night sky, and relax my being into the
hands that created such glory. Deep prayer can then take place.
FOR THE REST OF THE STORY, YOU'LL HAVE TO GO TO THE ABSTRACTS
PAGE, & PICK UP WITH THE CHAPTER 5 ABSTRACT. (You can use the "to
Abstracts" link below to get there.) I THINK THESE ABSTRACTS ARE PRETTY
SATISFYING, THOUGH. I WORKED MY TAIL OFF ON THEM WHEN WRITING
THE BOOK PROPOSAL!
to Abstracts>>
BTW, I welcome all questions, comments, or other feedback, positive or negative.
Please write me at sara@petitioninggod.com