Believing in Eternity

“God is eternal, not perpetual. Strictly speaking, he never forsees; He simply sees. Your ‘future’ is only an area, and only for us a special area, of His infinite Now. He sees (not remembers) your yesterday’s acts because yesterday is still ‘there’ for Him; he sees (not forsees) your tomorrows acts because He is already in tomorrow.”- CS Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature

                One of the biggest questions we can have as Christians is: how are my prayers answered? If you pray for rain, and a torrential downpour occurs the next day, you can easily look at past weather reports to find that the precipitation was inevitable. Some may use this evidence to say that God does not answer prayers, it was going to rain anyway. They will use the heresy-invoking word of “coincidence” to explain these events.  Although in reality, these events do not disprove God, instead they can show us that God does not operate in our realm of time. CS Lewis explains it this way, “Almost certainly God is not in time. His life does not consist of moments one following another...Ten-thirty-- and every other moment from the beginning of the world--is always Present for Him. If you like to put it this way, He has all eternity in which to listen to the split second of prayer put up by a pilot as his plane crashes in flames.(Mere Christianity)” This is the only logical solution in an illogical world. How else would He listen to your prayer? If you believe in a loving God who answers your prayers, but also believe in the inherent properties of this world, then this is the only reasoning that makes sense. Rain cannot be spurious. It is far easier to believe that God knows what you need long before you need it, through an Ian Malcolm sort of butterfly effect. The idea of prayer occasionally brings up images of God snapping his celestial fingers, but why would a God who wants us to choose to believe in Him do anything that upon any examination proves his existence? Instead we have to take the view that God acts in ways that help those who plead for His divine help, but do not prove His existence. Yet God knows His actions long before they occur to us, He is a planner. 
                If we look back on every single human event, it would be impossible to refute that everything happens for a reason. This is not to say that mankind is not in control of our lives, because then everyone and everything on this earth would be without meaning. It would not make sense for an omnipotent god to create beings with feeling to run through simulations. God has been looking out and answering our prayers for eternity, even if it is unable to be comprehended right now. There is no easy explanation for how God answers prayers. In this life I will never know the methods that He uses. I will never know what goes on behind the closed doors of the pearly gates until I (hopefully) reach them myself. Some things we simply need to be content with not knowing. The answering of prayers sadly has to be something we can’t know. Humans can always misconstrue the answering of prayers with luck or circumstance. It’s the way God designed it. One of the challenges and tasks of a Christian is to be able to look past that. 
               To borrow a story from David Foster Wallace’s This is Water: 

There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: “Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God. It’s not like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn’t see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out ‘Oh, God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard, and I’m gonna die if you don’t help me.’” And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. “Well then you must believe now,” he says, “After all, here you are, alive.” The atheist just rolls his eyes. “No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp.”

It’s up to us to believe. No matter what happens, there will be a temptation not to believe. This man prays and knows in his moment of prayer that he will die if he does not receive divine help, yet when this man is saved, he doesn’t believe that his help came from God. He doesn’t believe he has received his divine help. The word divine mistakenly comes with an idea of extravagance or ease. This is not the case. Why would God develop showmanship in the 21^st century when Jesus, his begotten, our savior, was born in a stable? The man in the story denies God because of the lackluster manner in which he was saved. It’s easy to think that this is simply because he did not already believe. However, the lesson becomes more relevant and more powerful when the story involves Christians. A flood (probably not of Genesis proportions, but you never know) was rising , and a city was calling for evacuation. A woman in the city knew she was in trouble, so she prayed to God to save her. Person after person came up to the woman and asked if they could help her get out of the city. Her response was the same every time, “it’s ok, my God is going to save me.” Finally after multiple people had tried to save the woman, God spoke to her. He said, “why have you dismissed all of the people I sent? That was me trying to save you.” When are we dismissing God’s works as those of the world? God answers prayers, but the way he does is more closely guarded than the 23 flavors of Dr Pepper. You have to make a decision to notice God. Only you can decide if you see Him.