Forthcoming by Sara Anderson
Here, I offer the "chapter-by-chapter outline" of the book proposal in
its present form. This consists of abstracts of each chapter, which
contain actual excerpts from the manucript, and I think you'll enjoy
them. Feel free to write me with any questions or comments, at
sara@petitioninggod.com. (I know it runs over the border of the
window; sorry about that but I hope it doesn't bother you.)
The proposal:
About this page:
Chapter One: Introduction
  I was going on fifteen when the Creator of the universe first
revealed himself to me, at a junior high after-school Bible study that
I was attending for purely social reasons. After a half hour or so of
chips & dip, Hawaiian punch, and strategic mingling in hopes of
impressing various objects of newfound romantic yearning, we
awkward and giggly adolescents settled in the living room of our
classmate’s home, and the Presbyterian minister began a simple talk
about the parable of the sower. A few minutes into it, I suddenly
became aware that a huge presence, way too big and powerful to be
a figment of my imagination, was lifting me up and showing me, in
a blinding flash of light and truth, that everything on earth was
contained within a sort of giant aquarium that was itself couched
within a larger milieu of love and benevolence. Suspended,
momentarily, above the sofas and chairs and tables and paintings, I
knew that everything was going to be OK and that all earthly events
were relatively unimportant in themselves because of this position
the planet occupied as a world within a larger world. A minute or
two later, when I tuned back in to the minister’s talk, he was on the
last category of the sower’s seed, that which fell on the good soil
and yielded a hundredfold crop, and I thought my brain was going
to explode with joy.
 Over the subsequent decades, while the memory of my vision has
been a source of tremendous comfort, my personal dialogue with
the obtruding being has undergone constant evolution that continues
to this day. At some point after the Bible-study zapping, it occurred
to me that it surely would be nice if I could get petitionary prayer to
work—“ask, and it shall be given unto you”—so I started trying
different techniques of getting the being to grant my requests. My
earliest efforts were concentrated on compensating for my hearing
impairment; the 70% loss meant I was continually subject to such
incidents as being called on in class when I had no idea what was
being asked, so I tried entreating God with a kind of willed belief
(almost like a blind faith) to prevent those occurrences, and they
largely ceased. Gradually over the years, the scope of my prayer
subjects increased, as did the sophistication of my petitioning
technique. By my early forties, I was making some rather
remarkable progress in areas like relationships and money
management as well as my endeavors to teach school despite my
disability, but this success was achieved only through repeated
psychic struggles. Aware that most books on praying tended to
gloss over the nitty-gritty of what actually took place in the gray
matter of the person trying to pray, I began keeping a
psychologically detailed spiritual journal. That journal is the raw
material of Petitioning God.
 In this chapter, I’ll explain my chief discovery: that fruitful
petitioning is invariably tied to lessons we need to learn or changes
we need to make in ourselves if we want God to answer our
prayers. In order to identify these lessons and make a start toward
putting them into action, we have to get to know ourselves and
God—not an easy task in our rapid-paced, social-and-entertainment-
oriented culture. But if we do make up our minds to carve out a
space amid the haste, we become double winners: the personal
transformations we have to undergo in order for our prayers to be
answered typically bring us even more peace and joy than do the
granted petitions they give rise to.
 Although my own belief in the Creator has withstood every
challenge I have mounted against it since that Bible study in 1971,
no deeply held faith is required to put the petitioning program into
practice. Since the time of St. Augustine, the activity of praying to a
God that one isn’t sure exists has been an accepted theological
position. Accordingly, readers can try developing a relationship with
God as though he exists, just to see what happens. The insights they
will gain into themselves and the universe will lead to a greater
psychological maturity regardless of the status of their belief.
 Furthermore, while it seems obvious from the context in which I
was zapped that Christianity is one way to understand the
supernatural being and our relationship to him, I have never seen
any reason to confine my ideas about God and spiritual progress to
the Christian point of view, especially not those stricter
constructions of Christianity that are so visible in the world today. I
think other religions (such as Buddhism and Judaism, including
Kabbalah) and other fields of knowledge (such as psychology), can
also shed light on the mystery of how we can best communicate
with our Maker.
 The idea of making requests of the deity pervades our culture, but
largely in the capacity of a comfortable myth. Even secular
humanists, who carefully avoid naming a supernatural being,
commonly say things like “Let’s have a good thought for her,”
while nearly all religions recognize petitionary prayer as one of the
chief ways humans can relate to the divine. Hardly anyone is the
least bit surprised, however, when prayers don’t work, because
they don’t expect them to, not consistently anyway. Petitioning God
is the story of what can happen when we do expect prayers to
work.

Chapter Two: Three Decades of Begging the Guy Upstairs for
Help
  This chapter will trace the development over the years of my
petitioning ability. I will introduce the reader to the spiritual lessons I
learned, such as:

●Ask and believe. I sent up prayers each morning my senior year of
high school, asking for help in hearing my teachers. My only
technique was simple willed belief. It worked, too, to an amazing
extent.
●Cultivate faith in the face of doubt. This time, my goal was to
secure a graduate teaching assistantship in my master’s program at
Mississippi College even though all the positions had been awarded
several months earlier. In desperation as time seemed to be running
out, I bolstered my faltering faith using the “Act as If” aphorism
from the twelve-step programs and the practice of visualization
from sports psychology. Refusing to give negative thoughts any
wiggle room, I repeatedly imagined myself in the desired TA
position, with classes to teach, papers to grade, and students to
come to my office for help. I even visited the campus bookstore to
examine the texts I would be using in my course. And at the very
last minute, the department head called and asked if I was still
interested in being a TA.
●Forgiveness is elemental. During my doctoral program at
Louisiana State University, where I was again a TA, I needed God’s
help as I tried to develop ways to compensate for my hearing loss in
the classroom. When I talked this one over with God, I realized that
I was blocking him from helping me by feeling annoyed at certain
insistently vocal students for asking so many questions in class. At
first, the idea of losing my annoyance— that is, of forgiving them—
seemed impossible; I had always been quite the misanthrope,
secretly disdainful of scores of people for no good reason. But
when I discovered that forgiving others in order to get your own
prayers answered was a requirement stated by no less than Jesus
himself, I was so excited to have such a clear and definite
instruction that I made up my mind to do whatever it took.
Repeatedly humbling myself and begging God to rip my annoyance
and disdain out of me, I finally succeeded in losing my
contemptuous feelings, which set the stage for him to grant my
requests for help in the classroom.
●Take a hint from life—or else! I was offered a chance at a dream
job in my hometown but, during the Interview from Hell, I blew it
magnificently as a direct result of my immaturity and egotism.  Like
a spoiled brat, I felt that I wasn’t ready for a full-time job yet, and I
was mad that they had even called me about it, because I knew I
had to agree to the interview since it would be crazy not to. So I
agreed to it but with a bad attitude, neglecting to arrange for some
kind if interpreter in case I needed one, and then when I got in there
I couldn’t understand a frigging word the department head was
saying. In my desperation I tried to simply guess at what she might
be asking me and answer accordingly, making a total fool of myself
and ruining my teaching prospects at that school forever.
Afterwards, in the serious self-examination that I was forced into, I
admitted that I sorely needed to change my outlook.
●Relax and let God do his thing. Later on in my TA career at LSU,
each day before class I would go through the motions of combing
my hair in front of the mirror in the ladies’ room, just so I could
stand there without calling attention to myself while I silently
entreated God to make the upcoming session productive and to help
me through whatever communication challenges lay ahead.
Pondering my humble position in the universe, I would make a
conscious effort to put my trust in the Creator—and sometimes
when I did that I could actually sense God’s presence there in the
ladies’ room behind me, as though the sturdy metal fixtures and the
thick concrete walls were a direct manifestation of his strength and
reliability. I found I could tap into that strength by relaxing
physically, breathing deeply and then letting my shoulders fall
downward as I exhaled, as if to relieve their burden of trying to be
in charge of everything when actually God had so much more
control over the entire situation than I did. It worked so well that
my end-of-semester student evaluations were the highest yet.

 Chapter Two will also examine the beginnings of my relationship
with my student Belinda, whom God put into my path by having me
teach her in Freshman Comp during my last semester as a TA
(spring 1996). Being instructor to this intelligent, fresh-faced, pre-
Raphaelite beauty, who was quite simply the first comfortably gay
woman I had ever been interested in, was a petitioning challenge in
itself, which I will convey in detail in the chapter. From the very
first session, she would sit in the second row, her long auburn
tresses incongruously atop heavy metal T-shirts and faded jeans,
and listen wide-eyed to every word I uttered—and then submit
deeply principled yet witty essays on a broad variety of subjects.
My teacher’s comments in the margins were my portion of the pas
de deux. As soon as the final exam was over, it was only a few
hours before we were at my apartment, shyly holding hands, gazing
intently into each other’s eyes, and conversing more intimately by
the minute. That day, I first learned of the deep pain Belinda had
experienced in her life, and began to hope that I could help her heal
from it. In any case, this was the beginning of what I call the
passionate month, which was how long the magic lasted before
Belinda withdrew abruptly.
 In my first desperate prayers for help with the acute pain I felt
over her exodus, I simplistically begged God to bring her back—
how could she just walk away from what we’d had?—but his
silence confirmed the futility of my pleas. While working through
my pain, however, I had the great good fortune to discover what
seemed to be the final piece to the petitioning puzzle. From my
reading of M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled, I learned that
the purpose of life is spiritual growth, and in my own
contemplations I realized that God is much more likely to grant
petitions with such growth as their subject or their foundation. (His
goal is for us to progressively become more godlike ourselves.)
 With regard to Belinda, then, it was easy to see why my simple
prayers for the restoration of the past were getting no response:
they completely ignored the fact of transformation or growth for
either one of us. With this insight in mind, I worked hard to revise
my requests, and began to ask God instead to help both Belinda and
me to grow spiritually. I dedicated myself to being continually alert
to ways I needed to change and mature, and also asked him
regularly to help her choose the good as she decided what kind of
adult she was going to be, both vocationally and personally. (The
latter activity was an entirely self-interested effort on my part; I
knew that her choosing the good was my best bet for getting her to
come back to me someday.) In any event, there I was with the last
of the spiritual lessons I learned during this period: We have to be
willing to transform ourselves if we want God to answer our
prayers.
 Over the next couple of years, Belinda and I were sporadically in
touch, but she was dating first demented Audra and then “older
woman” Nita, and experimenting with different career possibilities
and lifestyles. Chapter Two will end with a dramatic meeting in the
hallway at LSU in fall ‘98, when I drove down and stalked Belinda
in order to hand-deliver some letters I had written her that had been
returned with “NO SUCH PERSON” printed rudely over her name.
At the time, she was putting in cocaine-fueled twelve-hour
workdays at Nita’s bar and seemingly staying in school only by the
thinnest of threads. After persuading her to accept the packet of
letters “for the sake of our long-term friendship,” I decided not to
try to write her or call her anymore, even sporadically. But I kept on
petitioning God for her growth.

Chapter Three: Contact: Listening to the Voice Within
  This chapter will open with a recollection of a moonlit night in
April 1999 when I was out jogging, rhythmically pounding the
neighborhood pavement the way I’d done daily for years. As I
rounded a corner into a clearing where fully half of the starry sky
was suddenly and breathtakingly visible, a question presented itself
to me, entirely unbidden: Would I be willing to be just friends with
Belinda, whom I no longer had any contact with? Although I had
high hopes that she and I would eventually resume the relationship
we had started to have three years before, I had finally stopped
badgering her about it, and I had calculated that she wouldn't initiate
contact with me anytime in the foreseeable future. In addition to
being beautiful and brilliant, she was young (twenty-two), shy
(pathologically), and suffered from emotional damage that rendered
involvement with an older, more optimistic person like me
impossible to sustain. Why, then, I wondered, was this very distinct
voice in my head asking if I were willing to be her friend?
 One reason the question was odd was that I had never considered
being Belinda’s friend instead of her lover. Having gone from
teacher-and-student to the beginnings of romance in the space of
one day, we two had never been just friends.
 As I was running, this question that arose spontaneously in my
consciousness was clearly not my own thought. And because it
seemed godly in quality and aim, I recognized it as a direct
communication from that benevolent being who had long ago let me
know he ran this place we call the universe. I answered right away,
Yes, of course I'd be her friend—I love her. Then I spent the next
few blocks of my run marveling at the quaint and charming
prospect of becoming Belinda’s platonic friend. But soon I realized
that this meant I was going to have to come to grips with the
possibility of being her friend while she was involved with someone
else. My answer quickly changed to No way. When I turned the
matter over in my mind, however, I began to see that this was
precisely the type of challenge I should expect from God, centering
as it did on the notion of unconditional love. So, asking his
assistance, I made up my mind to be alert to lessons I
needed to learn that would prepare me to be Belinda’s true friend.
 The chapter will also explore the spiritual meaning of a series of
vocational events that happened to me about this same time. After
failing to be offered a university class to teach for the upcoming fall
semester, I chanced to chat with a certain modern-day Renaissance
man who unwittingly challenged me to do more with my life than I
was presently doing, which was editing freelance and caring for my
wheelchair-bound, Alzheimer’s-patient mother. I had coached
Luther in swimming when he was a kid, and when he simply asked
me what else I was doing, I suddenly realized I couldn’t justify
“Nothing” in my own mind, let alone his. That very evening, I
embarked on some earnest soul-searching, including many
petitioning conversations with God. Eventually, these culminated in
my decision to try my hand at writing.  
  Returning to the Belinda story, I will recount my shock over
receiving, some weeks after the question from heaven, a long snail-
mail letter from her. She wrote straightforwardly that she had
temporarily given up dating and had recognized the value of
intellectual friendships, which she hoped she could have with me.
Because I found it hard to believe that the shy Belinda would write
me (or anyone else) out of the blue for the mere purpose of
reestablishing communication, I read between the lines that she
must really want things to heat up with me again—an interpretation
I liked quite a bit better than the friends-only setup she described.
This propensity of mine to project my own thoughts and desires
onto Belinda’s letters (instead of just reading the damned things and
thus accessing her mind) was to continue for months and do plenty
of harm.         
  At any rate, there I was with my answer to why God had posed
that challenge to me via spontaneous thought two months earlier.
And there I was with his response to my sincere commitment to the
project of becoming Belinda’s friend. Now I found myself with a
whole new set of things to petition him about, chiefly the ins and
outs of this new phase of my relationship with her, which I was
nothing less than thrilled to be entering into.

Chapter Four: The Danger of Unrealistic Expectations (June
1999 to March 2000)
  One of the first things Belinda told me in our renewed
correspondence was that she had been seized by a mad desire to
become not a lawyer or an FBI agent (previous possibilities), but a
physician. “Overwhelmed,” she said, by a desire to heal others, she
was taking the required pre-med courses, and reported that for the
first time in her life, school was challenging and exhilarating. That
getting into med school was all she thought about. And that she felt
content for the first time ever. How I thanked God for granting my
petitions for her growth so thoroughly! She was still shy, and still
damaged, but this was a truly significant development.
 And so it went that Belinda and I emailed back and forth regularly
the first five months after she had initiated contact with that first
letter. And sometime in November, I started thinking how perfect it
would be for the two of us to meet on that most romantic of
evenings, the millennial New Year’s Eve. I knew Belinda had given
me no concrete evidence suggesting she was interested in becoming
romantic with me again, but I reasoned that we had been platonic
friends for five whole months now, and she had written quite a few
lengthy and intimate emails— and I was still misinterpreting the
whole idea of her having contacted me in the first place, by viewing
everything in light of my romantic fantasies. So on this very flimsy
basis I began constructing an elaborate scenario in which we would
usher in 2000 with a reunion celebrating the love we had shared
during the passionate month and looking ahead to the future. I didn’t
word it quite so explicitly in my invitation, but I did write her and
tell her how much I would like for us to get together for that special
night.
 My invitation wasn’t necessarily a mistake in itself, but whenever I
tried to appeal to God to make our hot date become a reality, I
found it impossible to get any real faith going at all. In Chapter Four
I will explore how I dealt with this problem; one way was to delve
into the subject of “type psychology.” From a book called Type
Talk (by Kroeger and Thuesen), I learned that not only were Belinda
and I polar opposites on the most significant characteristic by which
personalities differ, introversion versus extroversion, both of us
were also extreme specimens of our respective types. The big
difference between E’s, like me, and I’s, like Belinda, is that E’s talk
too much and I’s, too little—a piece of knowledge that went on to
prove indispensable throughout the years recounted in Petitioning
God. The metalesson here was that when I focused my attention on
learning about Belinda as a separate human being rather than
spinning my own fantasy about the romance, God readily provided
the educational experiences I needed. Regardless of that overarching
truth, however, I still wasn’t ready to give up my quest for the New
Year’s Eve date.
 In mid-December, feeling desperate that time was running out, I
made a list of practical petitioning suggestions tailored especially to
that situation. Each of these strategies had worked for me in the
past, such as when I landed the assistantship in my master’s
program or when I prayed before teaching at LSU. Reflecting the
fact that maintaining a faithful mood is absolutely essential to the
whole enterprise, these were my tips for successful petitioning
when I felt that my back was up against the wall:
1. Force yourself to Act as If, EVEN IF you're completely
pretending.
2. Use what little faith you do have left to ask God to restore your
faith.
3. Ask him 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 facilitate 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 whatever gets you in a
faithful mood; it's OK to play tricks on your mind in this sense.
 The problem for me at this particular time was that I knew in my
heart of hearts (though not in my conscious mind) that what I was
asking God to do for me was unrealistic, at least in the form in
which I was imagining it. My suppositions about New Year’s and
romance were entirely egocentric, having nothing to do with Belinda
or anything she had said in her writings.         
 Nevertheless, the list is an accurate encapsulation of some
effective techniques to stave off despair. I think the hopelessness I
was starting to feel was precisely the reason I was able to
produce it so forcefully. Therefore, I will encourage my readers to
take heed, but to remember that these techniques work only if they
have determined, by listening to God and their  consciences, and by
considering objective evidence based on the behavior and comments
of other people, that what they’re asking for is realistically possible.
 Among other highlights of the chapter will be some changes that I
saw I had to make in myself if God was to grant any of my
petitions, including those for the resumption of my contact with
Belinda, who had clammed up and stopped emailing after I issued
the big invitation. One such change was the seemingly impossible
task of overcoming my anger and impatience. Through a series of
trivial incidents that set off my fury (a new neighbor’s request that I
“curb my dog,” a long wait at a customer service counter due to a
credit-card foul-up), God called my attention to the work I needed
to do. Only after much resistance and with fervent prayer was I
finally able to make the decision to turn my temper over to God and
allow him to remake it in his image.
 Another change I saw I needed to make was to learn to perceive
and accept the many aspects of Belinda’s mind that were foreign to
my own nature. Up to now, I had been largely ignoring the
thousands of words she had written me about her tormented
relationship with Audra and about her own demons, blithely thinking
that all she needed to do was spend some time with good ol’
wholesome me to be cured of all the darkness. I now realized that I
had to stop filtering her actions and words through my own desires
and expectations and start paying attention to her. One day in a fit of
passion regarding both these changes, I dropped to my knees, took
several deep breaths, and concentrated as hard as I could on humbly
asking God to change me and truly letting him do so. Opening my
arms to the heavens, I relaxed my grip on myself, and suddenly I
began to feel 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 now possible.

Chapter Five: Change, the Only Certainty in Life (April to
August 2000)
  Belinda got back in touch with me via a long, chatty email in early
April. Of course complications promptly ensued, as they always do
when we go from our imaginations to real dealings with people. But
as I worked to maintain the right attitude about Belinda, God helped
me move forward by making me see that he was granting other
petitions of mine outright. One of these had to do with Bess, one of
the sitters for my eighty-nine-year-old mother, whom my brother
and I were keeping in her home (where I also lived) despite her
Alzheimer’s.
 A quiet, sweet thirtysomething African American with a huge
beaming grin that showed itself all too infrequently, Bess had several
children, including seven-year-old Danielle, who Bess said had been
a real problem lately, yelling nonsensically and hitting people for no
reason. Danielle had been to the university hospital neurology clinic
for a CT scan and an EEG exam, but they had both been negative,
so the clinic had referred her to the child-development department,
where the appointment was still months away. Bess told me she
wasn’t sure the neurologist had really understood how severe
Danielle’s problem was.
 Suspecting Tourette’s syndrome, I asked Bess if she’d like for me
to try to persuade the neurology people to give Danielle another
look. Smiling that big smile, she answered, “Oh, that would be
great! I don’t know if it’ll work, but that would be great!” As I sat
at my desk in contemplative silence, I recalled what my father had
taught me about asking people favors. Daddy used to say that most
people, when they were in a position where they could help you out,
felt honored if you asked them to. And most of the time they would
be more than happy to grant your favor. Although Daddy hadn’t put
his advice in religious terms, it did imply a godly respect for all
creatures, a realization that helped me have real faith as I asked God
to facilitate my conversation with whomever I was about to talk to
at the neurology clinic. I made the sign of the cross on my chest
and took a deep breath, relaxing in God’s presence before I dialed
the number.
 Even though I had enlisted God’s help, I was still surprised when
the receptionist said the neurologist could talk to me right away.
When he got on the phone, I established my “credentials”
immediately. “I’m a Ph.D. myself,” I said. “Bess Jefferson works in
my home caring for my mother, and I think she’s probably
described her daughter’s symptoms in more detail to me than she
did to you, and I just wanted to try to help because I see how badly
the kid’s problems are disrupting the family. Bess said someone at
the clinic had mistakenly thought she had told them the spells only
occurred at night, but that’s wrong—it’s all the time.” In reply, he
became highly technical, musing about genotypes, phenotypes, and
a couple of terms I hadn’t even heard of, so that I had to tell him
my doctorate was not in science! But he nevertheless discussed the
whole situation with me quite specifically, and then transferred me
to his secretary so another appointment could be set up with him for
the very next week. The new examination led to Danielle’s being
accepted as a regular patient at the neurology clinic, with a probable
diagnosis of Tourette’s, for which they immediately started her on
an experimental drug therapy. A grave diagnosis, to be sure, but
Bess’s sheer relief over finally being taken seriously was obvious
when she told me the news. I was so moved, I cried.
 A couple of months later, however, another medical situation
found me at first failing to handle the problem with prayer. In mid-
June my mother, who was normally as physically healthy as a
horse, was admitted to the hospital with an unidentified
gastrointestinal ailment, and it took me three days to think of asking
God to relieve her pain. The delay seems to have been a function of
the chaos my life had suddenly been thrown into; the sitters, the
wheelchair, and the usual hassles of caring for Mom at home had
been abruptly replaced by a blur of hospital staff, stretchers, and an
unfamiliar set of concerns about things like making sure the various
nurses knew that Mom’s doctor had waived the requirement that
she be turned in the bed every few hours, because she was unable
to sleep except on her right side. Since I wasn’t inclined to ask God
to extend her life—she was ready to go if ever anyone was—it took
me a while to realize I could ask him to make her feel better even if
she was about to die.
 Employing my own personal prayer triad, I crossed myself three
times, as I went through the mental tasks of forgiveness (of the
medical team for the various forms of exasperation they had
engendered), humility/submission (in the face of the Creator’s
power and omniscience), and faith (that he would be willing to grant
this request). I did this several times the third night of Mom’s
hospitalization, and the next day, the doctors succeeded in ridding
her of the GI obstruction that had been the source of her
discomfort. By the time I got there for my evening visit, my heart
swelled with joy at the sight of her sleeping peacefully. Up till then,
she had continually made these little puffing movements with her
lips—PUH, PUH, PUH—and other guttural noises that had indicated
her pain. I was truly thankful. She still had a touch of pneumonia,
which they had discovered when she had first gone to the ER, but
she was infinitely more comfortable.
 It wasn’t long before she even felt good enough to eat. For several
years, the ritual of my feeding her her supper had been a mainstay
of our interaction, the best opportunity for me to give her love and
affection in a way she could understand. Her taste preferences
having regressed along with her cognitive abilities, she loved junky
things, and I was grateful to see that she now happily agreed to try
some chips and Ro-tel dip I had made for her. Hamming it up as I
usually did at home, I presented the plate with a mock flourish,
telling her that it had been prepared especially for her by Sara Witsell
Anderson, the greatest cook in the world. She giggled and said, “I
love you,” which was her stock phrase the last few years of her
life. Alzheimer’s patients frequently become one-word speakers in
the last stages of the disease, and I think it was an emblem of how
happy my brother and I—with the help of the sitters—were able to
keep Mama that she settled on “I love you” as her answer to
everything.
 In any event, she ate about five chips with plenty of dip before she
started coughing and had to stop. Beginning the next day, her
pneumonia worsened, and she died peacefully three days later. I
immediately recognized the chips-and-dip episode as a gift from
God, a chance for us to have a last bit of normal interaction
between her feeling so bad from the GI ailment and her dying from
the pneumonia. I thanked him profusely, not only for that but for
her good long life as well.
 Chapter Five will also recount my petitioning struggles and learning
regarding several other issues. One was my writing Belinda a big
letter whose purpose was to break a year-long cycle wherein she
would enthusiastically accept my tentative invitations to get
together, but then as the time neared would fail to respond to my
emails until enough time had passed so that we would both simply
pretend to have forgotten about the tentative plans. With God’s help
in composing it, I now invited her to make a serious effort to
cultivate our friendship. Another issue was my volunteering to tutor
at the Adult Education Center but then instantly regretting my
enthusiasm and wondering how to get out of the commitment
gracefully. The chapter will reveal how I worked through my fears
and doubts in dialogue with God, who showed me what changes I
had to make in my thinking before he would grant my petitions for a
satisfactory resolution to the problem.

Chapter Six: Positive Thinking (September to November 2000)
  In early fall, walking rapidly from the magazine area in the very
back of Books-a-Million to the coffee shop in the very front, I
practically knocked over a display that was jutting out into the
aisle—and that was how God chose to introduce me to Neale
Donald Walsch's Conversations with God.
 The main thing I learned from the New Age Walsch was that it's
our images of ourselves that stand in the way of our changing,
growing, and getting what we want out of life. Intriguing, since for
years I had even had a sardonic name for my own view of myself in
regard to my love life: “Alone Again, Naturally.” According to
Walsch’s thesis, my Alone Again complex was not only the result,
but also the cause, of my perpetual isolation. And changing this
habitual view of myself was absolutely necessary if I was to petition
God with real faith that he was going to put Belinda (or anyone else)
back into my life. But how in the dickens was I going to do this,
since Alone Again WAS precisely how I deeply and enduringly
thought of myself? Walsch seemed to think changing was simply a
matter of will power, but I knew that my only hope was to ask God
to batter my heart, to violently rip my old thinking out of me, putting
in its place a brand new view of myself as no longer alone. My
prolonged struggle to acquire this new mindset will resonate with
anyone who has ever tried to make a radical alteration in their own
outlook.
 Whether Alone Again or not, in the months following my mother’s
funeral I had developed a terrific crush on the lady priest who had
preached Mom’s homily. Julia was tall, with short auburn hair and a
big dimpled smile, and outgoing to the point of exuberance. She
struck me as though she might be gay, and I wanted desperately to
become friends with her even if she wasn’t. After I mustered the
courage to invite her out to dinner, God tried his hardest to send me
some lessons about my tendency to run my mouth, but when the
evening finally arrived, my extrovert’s hyperactivity combined with
just plain nerves to make me forget such lessons altogether.
 As soon as the waiter took our drink orders and walked away,
Julia commented, “He’s cute!”—and several times in the next few
minutes she touched on the subject of men in a way that made it
obvious she was completely straight. With the suspense about her
sexual orientation over, I should have gathered my wits and made an
effort to be a better conversationalist. Instead, I gave an Academy-
Award performance as a truly self-centered bore. I rambled about
my life and my views as though I thought Julia found me
fascinating simply because she had preached about my mother four
months before—and by the time I started to realize what I was
doing, it was too late to stop in my tracks. When I left the
restaurant, the pain was so great that I drove around numbly for
half an hour or so, too stunned with disappointment to go home.
 During my nightly run, as I begged God for help, I realized that to
profit from my experience, I was going to have to relive it, as
painful as I knew that would be. It was two more days before I
could bring myself to face my blunders and to identify the many
hard lessons that he meant to teach me through my folly. In the
chapter, I will describe how it felt to recall such words as those I
had uttered when Julia and I were parting. To her cheery “See you
at church,” all I had to do was say right back at her “See you at
church!” and let her leave. But instead, my response was, “Yep,
you’ll see me. When I first started going back to church, I thought I
would only go occasionally, but I’m such a creature of habit that I
can’t do it that way. I either go to church every Sunday or I don’t
go at all—so I’ll see you Sunday.” Ouch! One way I gathered the
strength to endure this recollection was to ask God to minimize the
blunders in Julia’s memory, as well as to help me learn the lessons
well enough to apply them in future conversations.
 The end of my fantasy of becoming close buddies with Julia
caused my attention to turn back to Belinda, who still hadn't
answered my August invitation to start actively cultivating our
friendship. I had told her in that letter that I wasn’t going to write
her again until she answered my question. Now, I vacillated
between hope (that all I needed to do was to drop her a line
reminding her that the invitation was still good) and despair (that
what I really needed to do was to finally get the message and leave
her alone). Every time I would ask God for guidance, however, I
found myself considering how much he had already caused to
happen in this relationship, and how much good could potentially
come from it. I knew that Belinda shared my intellectual approach to
life, my love for poetry and good writing, and my desire to serve the
world as a means to a higher sense of fulfillment. I thought that our
friendship would help get Belinda out of her shell, and would
energize us both to do good for the world. It seemed clear that
keeping the faith was what I ought to do.
 Armed with these thoughts, on Halloween night I wrote a rough
draft of a new letter to Belinda. Then, as the chapter will show, I
spent the next several days struggling mightily against my doubts
and fears. It was only after much pleading with God for help, and
many revisions, that I finally brought myself to hit Send.        
 Although Belinda said she had taken my three-month silence to
mean I had become disgusted with her shenanigans and crossed her
off my list for good, it still took her two weeks to answer. She
labeled her long letter “draft twelve” of her efforts to articulate her
response.
 To put it simply, “draft twelve” was filled with wondrous answers
to many of my most fervent petitions. Eloquently recalling her hot
pursuit of me during the passionate month, Belinda explained that
she'd love to see me as often as possible but had heretofore been
prevented from doing so by fear and insecurity. To my cosmically
proportioned invitation to become my friend for life, she said
“YES!!!,” marveling at the “faith and patience” I had shown her
over the years, words I had never used in my communications with
her but had asked for many times in my dialogue with God about
her. I knew I had to keep praying my butt off every step of the
way— she said she was in many ways “still . . . a timid little girl”—
but I approached this new stage of our relationship overflowing
with exhilaration and determination to never again lose faith that God
had it all under control.
 In Chapter Six I will also describe dialogues with God on behalf of
my elderly aunt Sasa, who had asked me for advice regarding her
depression, and about the improvement of my work with Don, the
disabled young man I had now been tutoring at the Adult Ed Center
for several months. Also, in light of my new practice of attending
worship services regularly for the first time in twenty years, I will
comment on the limited relevance of church-going to individual
spiritual development. While church can be the setting of heightened
spiritual experiences—one of which will be depicted in this
chapter—it can also get in the way of our private attempts to find
God. The people and the music (especially when it’s as fantastic as
it is in my church) can serve as psychic fillers that keep us from
acknowledging the emptiness we feel, which can only be truly
satisfied by one-on-one communication with our Maker.

Chapter Seven: Keeping the Faith through Misfires (December
2000 to September 2001)
  Chapter Seven covers the ten months following my receipt of
Belinda’s draft twelve, months I might have expected to be more or
less blissful between the two of us. Well, I would have been wrong.
It was more like a ten-month roller-coaster ride, which I endured
successfully only by the strength I gained from my petitioning. In
December, she and I emailed volumes and she sent me a beautiful
Christmas card with the two female angels walking side-by-side
from William Blake’s Jacob’s Ladder, with a note inside so loving
and sweet that it was all I could do not to jump into my car and
drive down to Baton Rouge, burst into the furniture store where she
worked, and scoop her up in an ardent embrace. (By “friends for
life” I had not meant to exclude romantic involvement, just to
establish that we would always be true friends regardless of
whatever else happened. I wanted to be as close to her as I could
be, and rekindling the romance seemed a great way of deepening
our bond. I had accepted that it might never happen, but at this
point I was still quite hopeful that it would.) But then when I did
spend the day at her apartment on the 26th, a miscommunication
beforehand caused us to start out on the wrong foot, and we
suffered through six hours of awkward non-togetherness. The
following May, she surprised me with an invitation to her college
graduation, and I surprised her back by attending but failed to find
her after the ceremony, so that I ended up spending the whole
weekend alone in a motel room, alternately working on my laptop,
trying to get in touch with her, and hurting. And after a very nice
summer of communicating quite a bit, mainly via Belinda’s
voluminous email “tomes,” we had a dinner engagement in early
September whose highlight was a prolonged and mean-spirited
debate about the existence of God. Although during the passionate
month Belinda had seemed to share my views on that issue—and
indeed that was one of the reasons I had continued to pursue her—
now she was pumped full of scientific pontification seemingly
straight from the mouth of some biology professor who apparently
viewed the very idea of the supernatural as a threat to his or her
treasured theories of evolution and the Big Bang. Sitting on the floor
of another motel room of mine, Belinda threw out such phrases as
“it’s a proven fact that Homo Sapiens did not appear on this planet
in one divine flash” and “the idea of God is folklore, plain and
simple,” spectacularly shooting down my assumptions about her
spiritual state. And oh, how that hurt. When she left, I slumped into
the easy chair, holding my head in my hand and begging the Creator
for help.
 Some other petitioning highlights in Chapter Seven include:
●Dealing with my own Dark Night of the Soul, a deep spiritual
depression that engulfed me. God was still in his heaven, but I was
failing to muster up enough faith to ask him to reach down and pull
me out of the abyss I had fallen into. At first, all I could do was
keep my mind off the pain by staying active during the day and then
trying feebly to pray for quick sleep at night. But after a couple of
days, I began to feel ever so slightly less alienated from God, and
then I was able to do what has always struck me as a kind of
spiritual surfing: I would wait for the next cyclical rise of my mood
and try, using the faith I knew intellectually was in there somewhere
even though I couldn’t feel it at the time, to ask God to restore my
faith to the fullest. The idea here is to catch the wave of relatively
good feeling at the cusp and ride it as far as you can toward the
shore of your restored relationship with God. Just as in real surfing,
you put yourself into position, but the main thing that carries you
forward is the wave of better feeling that follows your darkest spells
in the natural ebb and flow of things. Although this surfing can take
several days to work, for me it’s a pretty reliable technique.
●Becoming aware of the beauty around me—the entire breadth of
sunset, acres and acres of uninterrupted gold and red blazing across
the hills and fields—as I drove home from a dinner in the country.
“God, you made this beautiful sunset, so help me never to forget
this tangible demonstration of your power, so that whenever I ask
you for something, I can truly believe that you can give it to me if
you want.”
●Taking on an important task of transformation connected to my
petitions for tutee Don’s progress with his newly acquired
computer. My prayers were being blocked by a certain fundamental
scorn I harbored toward his friends and neighbors, who I thought
ought to be more willing to come over and teach him the basic
skills. I didn’t know any of them personally, but I imagined that
whoever they were, they should be able to find the time to go over
and help the poor CP patient in the wheelchair learn how to use his
computer. In order to clear the way for God to grant my petitions, I
saw that I first had to ask him to remake my contemptuous feelings
toward these “shiftless” folks as a group. It took a long time for me
to simply make up my mind to relinquish my feelings to God, but I
finally did. And then, one method that worked to accomplish the
change itself was to examine my feelings in detail, which showed
me clearly that I had no right—or really any reason—to feel the way
I did, and then to take a deep breath and imagine God flushing the
feelings out of me as I exhaled.

Chapter Eight: Accepting Differences (October 2001 to
February 2002)
  Before the next two evenings Belinda and I spent together, in my
petitioning conversations with God I realized that the only thing I
could legitimately ask him to do was to help us lay the best possible
foundation for our long-term relationship—not to magically restore
the old Belinda to the way she used to be. Although I was still
hopeful that the romance might rekindle, I knew that the friendship
was the most important thing, and the only thing that I was positive
he willed for us. In my best moods, moreover, I admitted that the
God debate, in all its bitterness, had been vitally important as part of
that foundation we needed to lay, so I asked for the strength to
endure whatever else was to come. And he heard me, and granted
these petitions, although at the time I was almost too busy reeling
from momentary blows to my faith in the good Belinda to notice.
Her demons were so vicious that when she shared them with me,
the experience was almost harsh enough to cause me to turn and
run the other way, at least in the sense of ending my pursuit of her
friendship. In the two fall visits, she laid bare for my view her
obsessions with medieval weaponry, a 1950s murder trial of some
teenage lesbians who had coldbloodedly smashed one of their
mothers’ skulls with a brick, and Audra’s evil nature, which
continued to “enthrall” Belinda in a way that I (vanilla-flavored,
emotionally sheltered I) could not make heads or tails of.
 After each of these encounters, I struggled mightily in my dialogue
with God. The first time, I learned that if I wanted him to help, I
had to give up a secret wish of mine that Belinda would stop
associating with people I self-righteously thought influenced her
negatively, especially her only sibling, a drug-addled older sister.
The second time, he posed a much bigger challenge: I needed to
truly accept that it was at least possible that Belinda’s and my
getting together romantically would never be feasible because of our
differences.
 Every fiber of my being resisted that move for about two weeks,
but I finally did what I knew I had to do, submitting my will on the
issue and asking God to help me learn the platonic-friend lesson
once and for all, even if it had to be permanent. This act of
submission led to a major epiphany for me, which I related to
Belinda under the email heading NEWS FLASH (which I admit was
a news flash to no one but me): that, at the present time, she and I
were not compatible enough to be lovers, and possibly we never
would be. In her reply, her relief was palpable, and she made it clear
that she was as interested as ever in continuing our friendship.
 On the Saturday between Christmas and New Year’s, Belinda and
I dined at the same restaurant where she had taken me the very first
time we had ever gone out, at the height of our magic nearly six
years earlier. I was pleasantly surprised over and over again as her
good humor and pleasure in my company seemed only to increase
as the night went on.
 When the evening ended back at her apartment in the wee hours of
morning, Belinda, a self-professed nonhugger, shocked me by
initiating a tender goodnight embrace. I floated to my car and sang
hymns of praise the entire two-and-a-half hours home. Even so, it
wasn’t until several days later that I recognized this new Belinda as
God’s precise granting of many of my most cherished petitions.
 Other spiritual events examined in the chapter include a particularly
heinous instance of losing my temper. I chewed out a young
Gateway representative over the phone for no reason other than I
thought he was wasting my time with his incompetence—and
afterwards, my first reaction was to rationalize that I had learned to
control my temper a long time ago, so that this was just a little
anomaly that I could forget about. God, however, refused to accept
that excuse, instead forcing me to think deeply about the humiliation
I had caused the poor fellow. I don’t feel guilty about many things,
but I did about this. The sheer nerve of me, popping off at this
pitiable kid not a week after God had graced me with the enchanted
evening with Belinda. I felt so bad, any petitioning activity I might
have engaged in was made impossible by my mood. And for a while
there, it seemed God would have nothing to do with my efforts at
repentance. I think he just wanted me to suffer long enough for my
guilt to teach me a lesson. Finally, by begging him to make the
Gateway boy feel better and to help me fix this incident in my mind
to ensure that it never ever happened again, I was able to work my
way back into a position from which I could pray effectively.
 The next time Belinda and I went out to dinner, the mood was very
different from the holiday festiveness, because now she was
preoccupied with her failure to get into medical school and
concerned about how she might improve her chances the second
time around. I wanted nothing more in the world than to help her in
this endeavor, and had petitioned God about it quite a bit
beforehand. He really delivered, because we spent hours, first at an
old favorite bar and grill and then back at her apartment, formulating
a multi-pronged attack on the obstacles Belinda felt had hindered her
thus far. I found the evening personally gratifying, too, as Belinda
convinced motormouth me that she liked it when I rambled. Saying
goodnight, she initiated another long, slow parting embrace, and as I
stood there in her arms in the crisp, starlit, February-night air,
suddenly the old question of romance didn’t seem so important
anymore, compared to the meeting of souls that had occurred over
the past few hours. Not only were both of us beginning to be
transformed radically—Belinda out of her shell, I out of my
misanthropy—but we were also entering into a bond of sharing that
would empower us to go out and serve the world in our respective
vocations.

Chapter Nine: Submitting the Will (March 2002 to May 2003)
  Despite how well things were going with Belinda, it wasn’t long
before I had another big lesson to learn regarding her. What
happened was that I, like an idiot, made a jealous comment upon
learning that she had ongoing weekly plans with some people from
work, to which she responded in no uncertain terms that I had
better quit “keeping score,” and of course she was right. In my
dialogue with God following the exchange, I realized that if I wanted
him to repair the damage, then I needed to leave Belinda alone for a
while and branch out more to other people myself. No big deal, just
a breather of sorts.
 The biggest thing I did in the way of branching out was to go to
New York in June to meet up with some college friends. Even
though Lynn and Serena are two of the most important people on
the planet to me, and even though we had an incredibly marvelous
time, the main reason I went was so I could tell Belinda about it. I
viewed her as my “significant other,” which, at that time, meant that
nurturing our relationship was my top priority, period. Another
reason I made the trip was simply to follow where God was leading
me, which I knew by how inexplicably perfectly everything worked
out once I started making reservations, buying theater tickets, and
the like. And when I got back, my efforts were rewarded big time
when Belinda took me out to dinner at a fancy new Italian restaurant
and then to her favorite bar, where we stayed till the 3:00 am
closing time because we were having so much fun talking. During
that conversation, she revealed that she routinely printed out my
emails and carried them around her apartment for about a week in
order to “soak up the wisdom.” What a tremendous granting of my
many petitions for her to like what I wrote to her!
 Throughout the remaining eleven months that Chapter Nine
covers, our relationship flourished. I petitioned God to help Belinda
as she applied to med school for the second year in a row, always
starting my dialogue with him from the reality of her shyness,
which was the biggest obstacle she needed to overcome. Well, no
one who knew her could get over the spectacular result: she actually
did so well in her most important interview that the interviewer told
her he was rating her a “1,” which he said he had only given once
before in twelve years of interviewing. After she had been accepted
into med school, she remarked that if it hadn’t been for me she
probably would never have gotten in, which may be true, but it
wasn’t really me, it was God responding to my prayers.
 Some other petitioning projects discussed in this chapter will
include my work on forgiving an elderly uncle for his puritanical
attitudes and my pained dialogue with God for help following a
conversational gaffe at a Christmas party. But the project with
perhaps the biggest life lesson was another problem I had with that
old nemesis, my anger.
 Although I had improved in that area quite a bit, I still had far to
go. The instance of anger that I now needed to turn over to God
was my supreme irritation over some educational plans of Don’s
that I disagreed with. Every time the subject came up during our
tutoring sessions, I would feel my blood shoot up through my head
as I expressed my disapproval by clenching my fists in rage. As I
talked to God about it, asking him to help in any way he could, I
recognized the lesson attached to this problem as something I had
needed to learn for a long time: to stop trying to control everything.
Abandoning my efforts at control, especially regarding something
that was going to remain part of my daily life (meaning I couldn’t
simply never think about it again), was one of the hardest things I’
ve ever done. It felt as though I was releasing my grip on something
(Don’s plans) and thereby letting it loose into the swirling chaos of
the universe, whereas before I had been able to steer it where I
knew (or thought I knew) it needed to go. Very difficult, but also
one of the most valuable life skills I’ve ever learned.
 To be sure, the themes of anger and lack of interest in others were
things I always needed to work on in one way or another. Some
people seem to think that when an undesirable trait keeps
reappearing, that means the person’s transformation wasn’t
genuine. I disagree. I think all of us have core negative traits
(original sin, if you like) that challenge us over and over, so that we
have to continue to let go of them and ask God to take them away.
But we can be truly transformed in the sense that we can succeed in
turning over specific instances of our sins, and sometimes even the
whole sin itself, at least temporarily. And as long as we keep trying
in good faith to grow in godliness, our movement is in the form of
an upward spiral. Thus we can continually draw nearer and nearer
to the source of the universe’s power, even if we can never reach it
once and for all during this life. The take-home message is simply,
don’t give up if you lose your faith or return to your old habits! Just
climb back in the saddle and start your petitioning dialogue all over
again.

Chapter Ten: Persevering amid Scrapes and Snares (June 2003
to April 2004)
  The first spiritual challenge I will discuss in this chapter was the
one I faced upon learning that Belinda didn’t want me to visit her for
July 4th in Tuscaloosa, where she had moved just a few days
before in order to begin med school. First and foremost, I had to
choose whether to feel sorry for myself or to pray. Though that
may sound simplistic, the fact is that this choice is a vital part of the
petitioning process as well as of the overall petitioning outlook on
life. It was only after I made the choice of praying rather than
complaining that I was able to talk to God and send up some sincere
requests that he use the time to make Belinda continue to rejoice in
our friendship and to truly want me to come visit after she got
settled.
 My choice of prayer over complaint also paid off an immediate
dividend by making me much happier over the holiday than I would
have been otherwise. I had a surprisingly nice time on the 4th at my
nephew Sam’s house, and throughout the weekend I was able to
send up several more petitions—with faith—for the furtherance of
Belinda’s and my friendship in this new phase of her life.
 When I finally did go to Tuscaloosa a couple of weeks later, oh,
man, were those petitions granted on a grand scale. Simply put,
Belinda spent practically the entire weekend declaring her
appreciation of me and of us. In her car on the way to dinner the
first night, she was showing me the school when we somehow got
into a debate over whether she and I would still be able to see each
other if she started dating someone. When I maintained that
although I would always be her friend, I didn’t think it very likely
that we would still see each other under those circumstances, she
stopped the car in the middle of the street and turned to look me
directly in the eye. “OK, then I just won’t ever date anybody in my
whole life. This is the most important relationship I have, so I just
won’t ever date anybody in my whole life.” The only way I was
able to satisfy her enough to get her to drop the subject was to say
that I agreed that it was possible for her to date someone and still
see me. I loved every minute of this conversation and silently sang
praises to God the whole time it was going on!
 Several months later, I again felt initial disappointment when I
learned that my dissertation director/guardian angel Karen Eliot was
going to miss the 2004 John Donne conference, which we both
normally attended every year. She had missed it once before, and as
a result, I had felt partly invisible and partly awkward without her
there performing the function of including me in conversations that
otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to follow. As I began to think
through the matter, however, I recognized her absence as a
challenge from God to me, to become more adept at conversing
with all kinds of people without Karen’s assistance. So, as the
chapter will show, I petitioned him fervently to help me be more
sociable and communicate better with others, all others, asking them
about their work and truly listening to what they had to say. For
years I had worked, but only sporadically, on improving my eye
contact and not letting things get past me in conversations, trying to
develop the habit of asking people to repeat themselves if I didn’t
understand what they had said. This meeting of scholars whom I
already liked and admired was a perfect opportunity for me to make
a real improvement in those skills. Once the conference was
underway, each day at lunch I slipped off unnoticed and walked on
the beach, feeling very close to God as I reviewed the morning’s
successes and failures and asked him to make the afternoon fruitful,
helping me remember always to focus on others rather than myself.
It worked quite well, as I engaged in so many conversations during
the coffee breaks and receptions that I actually lost track of some of
them, which was unusual for me.
 Although Chapter Ten marks the beginning of the cancer story, for
most of the chapter my breast lump is more a nuisance than
anything else. My gut reaction to the disruption of my normal
schedule by the various doctor and clinic appointments was
annoyance, but thanks to the wisdom I had gained from my
petitioning, I quickly recognized the error of that small-minded
attitude. Since the diagnostic tests were spread over a period of five
months, my conversations with God about them are spread out
accordingly. During this period, the main lesson I learned was that I
was simply not in control of my health no matter how good care I
took of myself. In fact, I realized that cancer or anything else was
that much more likely to strike if I continued to commit the sin of
health pride,  if I could coin that term. I knew I was terribly proud
of my health and disdainful of those who didn’t take care of theirs.
In the past I had made some half-assed efforts to overcome this
attitude, but, judging by the feelings I often experienced in the
waiting rooms of doctors’ offices, I hadn’t succeeded. I knew I
needed to do better.
 Another type of disdain for a whole group of people that I had to
lose during this time was my intense dislike of old people, which I
discovered when trying to pray for my ninety-year-old uncle after
my aunt died, leaving him wanting desperately to go ahead and join
her. The chapter will reveal the work I did on this problem, which
was to grapple with my feelings for my late father and ultimately to
send up a prayer not to God but to Daddy, in which I apologized for
having sometimes acted ugly to him, and then asked him to step in
and urge God to hurry up and take my uncle home.         
 After a second ultrasound exam of my breast lump, the radiologist
said to give it six more weeks and if it wasn’t significantly smaller
by that time, to have it biopsied. During that period, I realized that I
should thank God every day, even more than I already did, for the
mere fact of my excellent health. I also saw that I should never
worry about the what if’s—what if I had to get a biopsy or what if
it was cancer. Instead, in these six weeks, I should joyfully thank
God every day for how unbelievably great I felt. My favorite time to
do this was mealtime, because I also liked to thank  him for
inventing the phenomenon of eating, which in my opinion was so
pleasurable that there was no way blind evolution could be
responsible.
 Events culminated with my being diagnosed with cancer. At first I
was numb with shock, but in about thirty seconds I recognized that
God had let me develop this dreaded disease in order to teach me to
stop being such a control freak about my health, especially when I
let my silly eating-sleeping-exercise routine interfere with my
branching out to others. For a long time I had been aware that it
was sinful for me to decline social invitations and the like if my only
reason for doing so was to adhere to my compulsive health
practices, but I had kept on doing it anyway. And now I knew that
God was showing me, in the vivid colors of the exam room and the
loud, clear noise of the surgeon’s voice, that my plan to take perfect
care of my health hadn’t worked at all. I didn’t necessarily have to
stop exercising and eating right, but I did have to stop giving it
priority over doing things for and with others. Moreover, if I
wanted to beat this thing as thoroughly as possible, then I had better
start paying attention when he tried to tell me that any of my
attitudes or behaviors were wrong or destructive.

Chapter Eleven: “What Are You Looking At?”: Cancer
Struggles and Lessons (April 2004 to July 3, 2004)
  Because my experience with petitioning had caused me to learn—
and deeply internalize—that life is a series of lessons designed to
help us become holy, I never felt any real despair over the fact that I
had cancer. The very idea of the disease did, however, help me
focus on God’s power as never before, since it was such a
straightforward demonstration of the fact that I could do everything
possible to keep myself healthy and then he could still pull the rug
out from under me so easily.
 A few minutes after recognizing the health-control-freak lesson,
while still sitting in the exam room of the surgeon who had
performed the biopsy, I saw that another bit of spiritual progress I
needed to make was to radically change my attitude toward
someone I will call person X, who was part of my daily life but
whom I hated with a passion, and had for a long time, for no reason
other than X got on my nerves severely. X had never done anything
to deserve my antipathy; if anything, just the opposite was true—X
acted all lovey-dovey to me for no reason, or rather, would have
acted that way had I allowed it. This did nothing but make me even
more violently opposed to X’s very existence. Perhaps the worst
thing about this particular sin was that I had never had any desire,
not even momentarily, to relinquish my hatred. The way I knew
now that such a  transformation was connected to my disease was
that one of my very first thoughts as I began to digest the diagnosis
was that I absolutely detested the prospect of X coming to visit me
or sympathizing with me in any way. At first I tried to ignore the
spiritual challenge God was setting before me and to maneuver
around this problem on my own; I even toyed with the idea of not
telling anyone I had cancer except my very closest friends, just to
keep X away. But with the help of signs, especially an email from
one of those close friends (Stephanie) saying that if I did that, then
when people eventually found out anyway, they would be hurt that I
hadn’t told them, I soon abandoned that dumb idea. And then, it
struck me that if I could truly let God change my attitude toward X,
then I would have a much better chance of having a mild experience
with a good result. Conversely, if I continued to hold onto my
hatred, he was likely to draw out the healing process in order to try
once again to teach me this very basic lesson.
 Chemotherapy had always been my biggest fear; the thought of
sitting there letting poison be dripped into my veins was extremely
hard for a health nut like me to stomach. When I realized that
whether I turned out to need chemo or not—or how much—could
very well hinge on whether or not I let God change my feelings
about X, you bet I was motivated to let go and let God. I had heard
of forgiving in order to be healed, but it had never hit quite this close
to home! Batter my heart, I entreated him, and replace my human
nature with your nature.
 Two days later, I reported that I could already feel God making a
little progress in opening up my heart to love X. But as for the other
project, of losing my arrogant, control-freak attitude about my
health, it had suddenly hit me, four days post-diagnosis, that it tied
in perfectly with the idea of chemotherapy, because being slowly
poisoned and having my immune system compromised was
precisely the opposite of taking such obsessive care of my health.
When I realized this I was horrified, because it seemed a sure bet
that God would send me chemo to teach me the right attitude.
Intellectually, I recognized the utter arrogance of any of us humans,
health nuts or not, thinking we could control what happened to our
health. But emotionally, I knew I still needed to work on
relinquishing my grasp. Thinking about it some more, I saw that it
was at least possible for me to humbly beg God to remake my
attitude immediately, before the surgery, and then accordingly grant
my petition for no chemo. A good portion of Chapter Eleven will
recount the work I did in my effort to learn all the lessons and make
all the changes God was attaching to the cancer experience, in as
short a time as possible.
 From the beginning, I was blessed with a more-than-adequate
support system, being in contact with all my friends by email,
especially Belinda, who said she was devastated and wrote several
times a day. I also talked to several people who had had breast
cancer themselves. Only once did I experience a sadness and needy
feeling, which hit me as I sat in church the second Sunday after my
diagnosis. Outside, it was one of those impossibly sunny, crisp,
unseasonably cool May days, the kind that’s so achingly beautiful
that it almost hurts your heart to behold it, and I decided
immediately to deal with my feelings by calling Belinda and seeing if
she could spare an hour or two from her final-exam preparation if I
drove over there for the afternoon. Making one of my triple
crossings on my chest before dialing the number, I asked God to
guide the call and whatever sprang from it.
 And boy, did he ever. Belinda accepted my invitation
enthusiastically, and during my visit she clearly thrived in the role of
helping me rather than the more familiar situation of me helping her.
I sent up a big thank you to God for this, as well as for her obvious
comfort and happiness in her vocation. It was all evidence of her
healing, which I had petitioned for so many times.
 When I was finally leaving Belinda’s place about ten, I don’t even
know who started it, but our goodbye hug quickly became a
communion of breasts. As though it was a contest to see who could
squeeze the hardest, as we pushed our chests together and together
and together, as if to transfer the invigorating, healing youth of her
bosom into mine by the force we were creating with our bodies. All
afternoon I had marveled at how healthy and strong and fresh she
seemed, and now, to feel that strength and freshness enveloping my
body—I couldn’t have imagined anything more perfect for that
moment in time. The whole thing was reminiscent of the passionate
month, except infinitely more meaningful now, grounded as it was
in a true give-and-take relationship of love, trust, and respect.
Recalling all that God had seen us through over the years, so that
she was still here offering me her love and support, I was absolutely
positive that he had it all under control. After that, I was never
afraid.
 That I was no longer afraid didn’t mean my struggles with
petitioning God about the details of the surgery and the post-surgical
treatment were over. Using the hotline to heaven that I had so
painstakingly developed over the years, I found I could ask him with
quiet confidence to help me through the one painful part of the
entire experience, four injections of radioactive material into the
tumor for the sentinel-lymph-node study prior to the surgery.
(Basically, I was able to relax into the will of the universe and know
that whatever was being done to my body was for the good of my
soul, and therefore I could simply lie there and let it happen without
trying to fight back.) And after the surgery, the cancer-free status
of my sentinel node meant I was immediately blessed with a good
prognosis, but it also meant I was faced with a hard decision
whether or not to have chemo, since there was now an 85% chance
that I would be fine without it. Because I was so hugely
apprehensive about the idea of chemo, I seriously considered not
undergoing it—and the hours and days of my struggles with that
decision fill much of the rest of the chapter. (I also struggled with
the other post-surgical recommendation, that of taking estrogen
blockers, which, quite simply, I resisted due to my own vanity. I
was worried that they would make me look and feel old.)
 Between the surgery and the final decision about the chemo
(which I ultimately made in the affirmative, after only the minimal
four cycles were prescribed), I spent an absolutely phenomenal
weekend with Belinda in Tuscaloosa, during which more of my
petitions about her growth and her joy in our relationship proved to
have been granted. The only non-perfect part of the entire two days
was a fleeting jealous comment I made at the very beginning when
something she said reminded me that she was still looking for her
Ms. Right. But we promptly resolved the matter, because I truly
was fine with the theoretical idea of her finding her honey; we had
always enjoyed “cruising chicks” together, and it was completely
out in the open that she (if not I) was serious about finding
somebody. Three weeks later, however, between the first and
second of my chemo treatments, that “theoretical” status changed
when she wrote that she had met “someone wonderful.”

Chapter Twelve: Enlisting God’s Help in Coping with Loss (the
rest of July 2004)
  In Belinda’s fateful email, she said she had been debating how to
tell me the news, knowing it was going to be hard for me because I
was so happy with what I had with her. She also didn’t want to
jeopardize my health for the rest of the chemotherapy by upsetting
the excellent spiritual state I had maintained so far. She was right to
be concerned! It had been six years since she had dated anybody,
and a big part of me had thought she never would, although she had
surely never tried to mislead me regarding her hope of one day
finding someone. She, like me, was not interested in dating someone
merely to avoid being alone, and I had just thought it likely she
would never find anyone and we would carry on what we had come
to call our “passionate friendship” indefinitely.
 Buffered by the shock I felt, and not wanting her to feel guilty, I
wrote back that it only hurt a little, and only because what we had
had for the past two-and-a-half years had been so incredibly perfect
for me. The first part was kind of a lie, because it already hurt more
than a little. Funny, just that week in reaction to a friend’s story of
having cried when her hair fell out from chemo, I had been thinking
how nothing ever made me cry—so maybe God had to show me
that something could make me cry. Groping for my spiritual
bearings, I tried to pray: God, please let me learn all the lessons I’m
supposed to learn from this, and please let B learn all she can about
herself and about life, and please let this relationship with Nicole
make her happy, whether it turns out to be short-term or
permanent. I gather Nicole is a good, positive person, and that’s the
most important thing, but I really don’t know that for sure yet, so
help B keep her good self in mind no matter what N is like. And
please continue to maximize both of us individually and in our
friendship and our appreciation of each other. And please don’t let
this affect my good brain chemicals that are helping my chemo
experience. Thanks!
 The next day, I wasn’t so upbeat. And so began a solid month of
voluminous journal entries as I worked through each successive
mental state that accosted me. At first the pain was raw, and,
although I knew in the back of my mind that God would help me
make sense of it if I asked him to, that was not yet a real possibility
on the day following Belinda’s email. Whereas the day before I had
been shielded from the worst of the pain by being in shock, now I
was feeling it in full force: I feel like a shell of my normal self, an
absolute shell. I’m lost. At least this has renewed my sympathy for
adults who get upset over divorces and other breakups. I hope I’ll
never again think I’m more evolved than they are . . . . God, help
me see what to do next. You’ll have to batter my heart, because I’m
not really in the mood to listen.
 After a week had passed, I had improved enough to where I heard
God speaking directly to me through a Sunday sermon about how
the most joyful life of all is that which derives its  fulfillment from
service to others—not from self-absorbed matters like relationships.
In a few more days, I realized in my dialogue with God that not only
was he challenging me to accept the fact that I no longer had my
passionate friendship with Belinda, the exclusivity of which had
been extremely satisfying to me, but he was also challenging me to
grow beyond the need for an exclusive relationship with anyone.
Although I found this prospect deeply exciting, the unregenerate
part of me was quite reluctant to simply let go of my need and
thereby (or so it thought) resign myself to being alone forever. The
chapter will reveal how I dealt with this conflict, as well as with the
spells of pain that continued to occur intermittently; primarily, what
I did was to prayerfully tell myself to take the long view, to get my
emotional energy from doing things for others, and also to be open
to new relationships of all types. This stance felt truly right, so I
asked God to keep guiding me, and to keep guiding Belinda as well,
because we were absolutely still best friends and I absolutely still
believed that our friendship was meant to nourish and facilitate each
of us in our service to the world—which just happened to be that
key to abundant life.

Chapter Thirteen: Branching Out (August 2004 to July 2005)
  It was August 1st before I shifted my attention to something
besides Belinda. Then I considered the chemo and the petitioning I
was doing in relation to it. After the sobering experience of not
being able to get the third treatment on time because my white cell
count was too low, I had stepped up the frequency of my ongoing
prayer. I regularly asked God to make the stuff work, to minimize
the side effects, and to make me continue to be OK about actually
sitting there letting them put poison into my veins, which was still
the hardest thing for me to do. All these petitions were granted more
than adequately, so that except for the 48 to 72 hours after each
treatment, when I suffered from nausea and vomiting, I felt
absolutely normal during the entire course of the therapy. But the
chemo was challenging me, a great deal more than the surgery had,
to submit my will and my body to the medical establishment,
allowing them to make me ill for the sake of my long-term health. It
was also giving me the opportunity to face my biggest fear and
come out victorious. Without the chemo, my overall cancer
experience would simply have been too mild for me to have made
much spiritual progress at all. My instincts had thus been right when
I had chosen to accept the chemo recommendation and petition God
for a mild experience.
 The following March, I happened to revisit the building where I
had received the very first cancer diagnosis, a realization that
occasioned joyful praise that the whole thing already seemed a
distant memory less than a year later. On the way home, I belted out
“Now Thank We All Our God,” and tears of joy streamed down my
cheeks. I firmly believed that the reason my cancer treatment had
gone so well was because I had taken full responsibility for having
contracted the disease, which I had been able to do because of all I
had learned in the preceding few years about how life is a series of
sometimes painful lessons designed to help us become holy. I knew
I had brought on my cancer by—among other things—my defiant
attitude toward the medication Prempro, which I thought gave me
energy. When my friends had warned me of its demonstrated link
with breast cancer, I had replied, “I’ll stop taking it when they pry it
out of my cold dead fingers.” My illness had been God’s way of
challenging me to overcome that self-absorbed, entitled-to-feeling-
good mentality.
 As for Belinda, I felt new pain upon learning that she had met
Nicole online, which indicated that she had been discontent enough
during our passionate friendship to seek a sweetheart in what struck
me (at first) as a drastic manner. I thought the best way for me to
handle this depressing news was to stop emailing her regularly.
After a few weeks, however, she wrote saying she missed me, and
when I talked to God about what to do, he let me know that my
next step up the spiritual ladder was to become comfortable with the
idea of being active friends with her while she had a girlfriend. That
work was sometimes painful, as I came to terms with the fact that
even though I had been the only person outside Belinda’s family that
she had socialized with for several years, I had never been as
important in her emotional landscape as she had been in mine. (This
meant things hadn’t really changed as much as I thought they had.)
 Nevertheless, during the eleven months covered by this chapter, I
put into practice the chief lesson of my cancer, branching out to
others more than ever before. During the work week, I served
lunch occasionally at a soup kitchen and enrolled in a Spanish class
at my church on Wednesday nights. The lunches at Stewpot were a
rapid-paced hour. First we would work assembly-line style, dishing
out the hot food—say, lasagna, mashed potatoes, turnip greens,
cornbread, and cookies—as fast as we could onto plastic trays.
Then we would pause for the director, a jovial, animated black
minister, to give a brief pep talk/sermon to that day’s crowd of
hungry, mostly homeless folks who had gathered at the tables in the
large dining hall. He would ask if it was anyone’s birthday, and
usually one or two people would raise their hands, so the entire
crowd would give a rousing rendition of “Happy Birthday,” followed
by a round of applause. The talk would end with grace being said,
and the instant “Amen” was uttered, we workers would move as
quickly as possible to carry the 150 to 200 trays to the patrons
before the food got cold. Most would voice hearty thanks, and all
would devour the meal. In the “Spanish I” class, about eight adults
of different sizes, shapes, ages, and social backgrounds had a laid-
back good time studying things like dental and medical terms and
how to fill out personal-info forms in Espanol, since the original
purpose of the course had been to prepare volunteers for the church’
s annual medical mission to Honduras. I had no plans to do that
myself, but the course was a great way to give expression to my
new, less self-absorbed identity.
 On the weekends, I joined an online matchmaking service myself
and met an interesting, spiritual-minded woman, and also started
driving to Walls, Mississippi, to spend Sunday afternoons with my
toddler-and-infant great-nephews—neither of which I would have
bothered to do before Belinda had “left” me. The woman and I
emailed back and forth a good bit, and met when she came through
Jackson, but I was starting to discover that I loved being single and
so I told her I wasn’t looking for a relationship. With the great-
nephews, the reason I wouldn’t have gone to the trouble before was
because I had thought I didn’t like kids very much, and had
particularly never understood why people carried on so much about
the very young ones. But they were there, and their mother (my
niece) and I have always been close, and I didn’t have anything else
to do since no more Belinda, so I did it, and was utterly shocked at
how much I liked them. They were so fresh and cute and cuddly,
and when they got to where they would light up in my presence, I
was hooked.
 At any rate, I viewed all my new activities through the prism of
my ongoing dialogue with God. While none of the other contacts
were as intensely pleasurable as Joshua and Aidan, the chapter will
show that collectively they brought me surprisingly great joy.

Epilogue: The Next Stage Spiritually?
  From the standpoint of late summer 2005, I marveled that after ten
months of the dreaded estrogen blockers, I had no side effects
whatsoever, and felt absolutely great physically. I was also happier
in every way than I had been before my cancer, having found (for
example) an ineffable joy in the group interaction of my Spanish
class. Whereas in the past I had avoided all such interaction because
of my hearing impairment, I had discovered that if I chanced to say
something that made the group laugh, the result would be a rush of
pleasure that almost made me shudder with delight. Moreover, in
addition to the joy I received from such new activities, I also felt
infinitely happier with my social and personal life now than I ever
had with Belinda, even after our relationship had evolved to its
extremely satisfying state. The magnitude of this happiness seemed
to be based on the fact that it was completely independent of any
particular other, although it was vitally dependent on others in
general. I now felt that I no longer had the gap in my soul that I had
lamented was suddenly unfilled when Belinda had started dating
Nicole. Through my petitioning, I had navigated both my cancer and
the end of Belinda’s and my pseudo-romantic “passionate
friendship,” and the growth I had undergone had opened up a world
for me that was richer and fuller than anything I could have
imagined when my singular focus had been on Belinda.
 As far as my prayer life went, I observed that the subjects of my
petitions to God had, at least for the time being, undergone a radical
shift. Whereas in the past I had only infrequently felt inclined to
pray for others, I now discovered that many of the petitions I
naturally wanted to send up were precisely for others rather than for
myself. I was continually struck both by my own plenty and by the
genuine problems that seemed to be everywhere I looked: drug
addiction, illness, unemployment, problems within various types of
relationships, the pain of unwanted divorce, the maladies of old age,
the pain of having lost a child—the list went on and on. Formerly,
my method of praying for others had been to rather clumsily and
uninterestedly try to petition for them by imagining what
transformations they might need to undertake in order for God to
improve their circumstances, and then asking him to help them
undertake those transformations so he could then send them what
they needed or wanted. This system didn’t work very well, for
obvious reasons. Now, however, I still wasn’t in a position to know
what others needed to do to get God to help them, but their needs
had become my desires and wishes and therefore the natural
subjects of my petitions.
 My lifelong friend Tim is a good example. Tim and I go way back;
he grew up being the best friend of one of my nephews and also
one of my most dedicated swimmers. As adults, the fact that we’re
both gay has increased our bond. Tim had a successful advertising
business in DC for a decade after college, but finally packed up and
came home because his addiction to Xanax and other substances
had led his partners to buy out his share of the business. Several
years after he moved back, his mother, whom he was close to, was
diagnosed with terminal cancer at age sixty-eight, and several
months later, she died. For a variety of reasons, this was more than
Tim felt he could bear, and he tried to kill himself with an OD.
However, he didn’t quite succeed, and after a couple of weeks in
the hospital followed by a month in residential rehab, he was out
again, living in a halfway house, working at a low-paying, dead-end
job, and continuing his AA/NA course of recovery. All of Tim’s
siblings had good careers and thriving families, and I felt deeply for
him, being the only one who had nothing now that their mother was
gone. When he told me about his reasons for having wanted to die, I
countered with my opinion that he had quite a bit to live for: “You
know I’ve been telling you for years that you’d make a terrific drug
counselor.”
 “Yeah, I’ve been looking into the master’s in sociology that I could
get from Millsaps [a local private college],” he replied.
 “But that’s so expensive,” I cautioned. “I think you should see
about going to Jackson State instead.”
 “But I can get financial aid,” he responded absently.
 With Tim’s current situation, both parents dead and himself
without even a decent salary much less any other money to his
name, I knew the private-school plan would still cost too much, but
had trouble convincing him of that fact, since he was thinking like
the privileged person he had always been. He mentioned that he had
an interview coming up to be a waiter, where he could make more
money, but he didn’t have that in the bag yet, plus I thought his
educational expenses would still be too high. Therefore, during the
week or so that Tim’s situation was on my mind, whenever I would
start to consider what I wanted to ask God to do for me, one of the
main things I wanted was to see Tim get on the road to a new life.
 In my dialogue with God about Tim, I articulated my concern
about his unrealistic attitude toward his financial situation, and made
specific pleas for him to find some kind of well-paying work as well
as to become interested in getting his degree from a public
university. In conjunction with these efforts, I did what I had
learned over the years must always be done if we want God to grant
our requests as fully as possible, and that was to forgive everybody
about whom I had any type of negative feelings whatsoever, even if
they had nothing to do with Tim or his fortunes. (At this stage of
my spiritual journey, I knew that all forgiveness helps all petitioning,
although it may be true that it’s more important when the
forgiveness task is directly connected to the request.) Although I
had successfully conquered most of my major instances of anger
and hatred, I still had plenty of little everyday things that I found
annoying, which threatened to block my efforts to cultivate vital
faith that God would do what I was asking. Well, my project of
forgiveness worked, because God answered all my prayers about
Tim, who became a popular and happy waiter at a decently lucrative
restaurant, with plans to get his sociology degree at a historically
black school where as a “minority” student he would owe no tuition
whatsoever.
 So this is what I meant when I said that the things I now wanted
to petition for were often the solutions to others’ woes. Wow, I
was truly and radically changed—and look how much for the better.
Think back for a minute to me at the beginning of this narrative,
accosted by God’s voice while out running under the stars in April
1999, willing to rise to his challenge only because I thought it might
get me somewhere with Belinda. Then look at me at the end,
embroiled in others’ problems simply because I fervently desired
that their situations improve. Remember how I said that the purpose
of life is for us to progressively become more godlike ourselves?
Well, this is what I meant! I had most definitely advanced to the
next stage of the spiritual journey!
Petitioning God: What I Really Had to Do
to Get My Prayers Answered
Petitioning God: SOME EXCERPTS