Some people think that prayer just means asking for things, and
if they fail to receive exactly what they asked for,
they think the whole thing is a fraud.
To St. Paul, stripes, stones, shipwrecks, and
thorns in the flesh were religious experiences; to Judas Iscariot,
the daily companionship of Jesus of Nazareth was not.
"God has editing rights over our prayers. He will...
edit them, correct them, bring them in line with
His will and then hand them back to us to be resubmitted."
It always strikes me, and it is very peculiar,
that when we see the image of indescribable and
unutterable desolation - of loneliness, of poverty and misery,
the end of all things, or their extreme - then rises in our mind the thought of God.
"A religious man is a person who holds
God and man in one thought at one time,
at all times, who suffers harm done to others,
whose greatest passion is compassion,
who is greatest strength is love and defiance of despair."
God is a child who amuses himself,
going from laughing to crying for no reason,
each day reinventing the world to the chagrin
if hair-splitters, pedants, and preachers,
who try to teach God his job as Creator.
"All of the members of this cell shared the same religious convictions,
an Islamic lifestyle, a feeling of being out of place in unfamiliar cultural
surroundings that they were not used to."
God has editing rights over our prayers.
He will... edit them, correct them,
bring them in line with His will and then hand them back to us to be resubmitted.