Unanswered Prayers

Stories in this episode: Anna’s teen years are spent in anger and frustration at God for not saving her mom until an unwelcome opportunity sparks a new perspective; Juan is stopped in his tracks on his way into a fast-food restaurant when a sign from heaven sheds new light on an unanswered prayer that haunted him for years.

To see our show notes for this episode, go to ldsliving.com/thisisthegospel

TRANSCRIPT: 

KaRyn  0:04  

Welcome to This Is the Gospel, an LDS Living podcast where we feature real stories from real people who are practicing and living their faith every day. I'm your host KaRyn Lay. 

I wouldn't say I am a huge modern country music fan – I tend to like my country a little bit more dusty, but when I put today's theme into Google, just to see what I could see, only one thing popped up in the search results. 

The 1990 Country Music juggernaut of a song from Garth Brooks called, "Unanswered Prayers." It immediately triggered a series of flashbacks to those awkward dances at Rockland Junior High where the only thing bigger than my hairsprayed bangs was all of my anxiety about being asked by an actual boy to dance to a slow song. 

And if you're unfamiliar with this particular slow song, let me give you a quick synopsis. It's a story about a teenager begging God for something that he thought he wanted, only to realize as an adult that getting that thing that he wanted, would have precluded him from the gift of his current family and life. The song has all the country feelings – regret, longing, a high school football game, and a nod to a loving Heavenly Father. And it ends with a super catchy chorus. 

So if you want to jaunt down American Memory Lane, hit the YouTube give it a listen. But here's the thing, Garth song and its catchphrase, "Thank God for unanswered prayers," is a little overly simplistic for my taste. 

It might make for a really great t-shirt at the merch table, but I think that understanding and making sense of our own unanswered prayers can feel a little bit more confusing and even devastating when you're in the middle of the asking and the not getting 

Getting to gratitude and thanking God for saying no is sometimes a really long and perilous journey. So today, we're going to dig into the complexity of the spiritual phenomenon with two stories from people whose righteous desires didn't end in easy yes's. 

First, we'll hear from Anna, who's wrestle with prayer began pretty early on in her life. Here's Anna.

 

Anna  2:11  

Growing up in primary, I was always taught that if you had a good desire, and if it was a righteous desire, then Heavenly Father was going to answer your prayer, and He was going to give you what you wanted. And I was always taught about the miracles that happened, you would read about it in the scriptures, and I would, you know, hear people bear testimony about the miracles in their own life.

So when I was nine years old – I had just turned nine – we found out that my mom's cancer had come back. She was diagnosed with breast cancer when I was five, and then had been in remission. and it had come back. And this time, they told us that it was terminal, and that she was probably going to not survive it because it had spread so rapidly throughout her body. 

But as a nine year old girl I had, you know, all the faith in the world. And I knew that – I knew that it was gonna be okay. I was like, "No worries. I'll just, I'll just pray" – because I felt that praying for my mom to live and to not die was a very righteous desire. 

And so I prayed so hard that she wouldn't die because I didn't want her to, and I really believe that if I prayed that she wouldn't die, that that she wouldn't. That she would survive, that this would be, you know, one of those miracle stories. 

But on October 13 2005