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[bonnie]

I have an acquaintance that needs some help. It is a difficult story/experience to relate. Hopefully I can do it justice and more importantly someone may be able to help This is a very real story
She has opted to read and hopefully gain some insight. She is very fearful of registering and interacting with those on a forum since reading of the subpoena. Realizing just how easy it is for those that are curious as to your identity to gain acess to your personal information.

"Jane" has always been in a spiritual turmoil since a young child. She thinks God knew she would not be saved at an age of 8, so therefore did not hear her prayers or if did, knew it was already to late.
Jane was a very lonely child. Mother pretty much absent even when physically there. Father a little more attentative.
Jane's family had a loose connection to the SDA church. As such had a few of our children's books. Jane was a very lonely child and used to use the book characters as imaginary friends to pass the time. The inside of the hard cover children's hour was  a place for imaginary friends. She really had no one else.
Her homelife was at least in part one of the reasons for her inability to make friends, Jane also feels people just plain didn't like her for whatever reason.

She began making up stories to impress, once in awhile taking things not belonging to her, mostly out of a real need, or a desire to have what other children had.
Bedwetting was also a problem.
Something occurred in her life around the age of nine she became conscious of the topic of salvation. It had quite an impact on her.
She doesn't understand why God did not hear an innocent child's plea to help her. She spent many hours in prayer while alone. Asking God to help her with her bad habits. She was so overwhelmed with what she knew she had done wrong she cried and cried while asking God to help her.
A non-family member offered to pay for jr camp for her. She prayed for days before going about wetting the bed. Nothing changed except she was teased as well for wetting the bed.

She firmly believes God could not hear her because she had already lost her salvation and could not be saved.
Nothing much has changed in her life since she was a child. If God could hear her, why would he not accept the conversion of a young heart and help her??
Big question

[inga]

Yes, this is a very biq question and a difficult one. It is basically the same question as "If there is a good God, why to bad things happen to good people, with the added conundrum of how God answers prayer.

There is no conclusive answer. But it seems to me that there's a lot that does not show up in this story -- perhaps things this woman does not remember happening. God doesn't always answer prayer directly the way we expect. He may lead us a roundabout way, the way He led the children of Israel in the wilderness for 40 years, instead of leading them straight into Canaan. Although most of the people asked to die in the wilderness, it is likely that many repented sincerely. Yet God did not seem to answer their prayers.

In this case, I'm thinking that a genuinely Christian counselor can probably help this woman. Her childhood feelings of condemnation probably have a history over which she has no control. She needs help in dealing with that history.

One thing is utterly certain -- and that is that God did not exclude a little girl from his care because she had done something "bad." Even if she had done something seriously bad (and I doubt that was the case here), God forgives. He forgave David who committed adultery with Bathsheba and murdered her husband. He forgave King Manasseh who made the streets of Jersualem flow with the blood of God's people.

It is very likely that her understanding of salvation as a child was very faulty, and she believed that she would be saved if she could only be good enough. So she pleaded with God to help her overcome her bad habits. If she has succeeded, perhaps she might have turned into one of those self-righteous "Christians" whom even the Spirit of God cannot reach.

We are not saved because we are good. We are saved because God is good. We are utterly sinful from the inside out. There is no remedy -- nothing we can possibly do to make ourselves good enough to save. Our only hope is to throw ourselves upon Christ's mercy. He only can and will save us. When we have done that -- confessed our sins to Him and committed our sins to Him, we must believe that He will do for us what He has promised. We have no other choice, because we're lost without him.

We do good because we are saved through Jesus Christ. The natural response of a saved heart is to want to serve Jesus as best we know how. We will continue to make mistakes, but Christ accepts our faulty service oh so gladly. As we continue to focus on Him and His love and trust Him with our day-to-day needs, we grow more and more like Him.

I learned early in life (my teens) that self-consciousness, shyness and self-condemnation are simply another form of self-centeredness. Only as we look away from self and to Jesus can He do anything for us. In faith, we need to leave our salvation to Him and reach out to others who need our help. We can always find someone worth off than ourselves to love.

Blessings,
Inga

P.S. Bad stuff happens to good people in this world because Satan is the "prince of this world" (which  Christ acknowledged), and as long as we're still here, it will continue to happen. Yes, God intervenes somtimes, but He can't do it most of the time because that would spoil the demonstration of the effects of sin, and people would serve Him for the earthly rewards rather than for His character of love.

[bonnie]

Thanks Inga for your quick response. You are right of course that there is much to this story
It is hard to relate someone else's experience or thinking.

I appreciated what you wrote as she has said many times, she doesn't know how to pray


Bonnie

[inga]

Hi Bonnie,

Just noticed your response ...

she has said many times, she doesn't know how to pray.

If you have a chance to talk to her on the subject, I suggest you tell her that praying is talking to God just like talking to a friend. She can talk to Him, just like she can talk to you.

Something to note is that when we talk to a friend, we do not keep saying the same thing over and over. We do not pour out a list of requests -- though we might very well ask a bunch of things at once. A conversation is give and take. So, when talking to God, it helps to use the imagination He gave us to imagine that He is right beside us, hearing us. That means we also spend some time *listening* in our prayers.

Something I have found particularly helpful is prayer journaling. I will read a portion of Scripture till I find something that "speaks" to me. Then I will write down what I gained from the passage, and I will write out an accompanying prayer. I have written out specific requests and then annotated these later with the the answers.

Hope some of this helps. The key is to recognize that prayer does not need to take a particular form -- that God hears us just like our friends do. The difference is that God hears us even when our friends *don't.* We can talk to Him even in the privacy of our minds.