For you my beloved family and friends

before I lose my mind and my one typing finger.

Answer to prayer.

The answer to prayer is something that you will recognize as frequent or seldom depending upon your childlike faith and intimacy with God.

The answers to prayers are at those times when the eternal touches the temporal and when the spiritual touches the physical. It is when the infinite touches the finite and it has to do with “the Timing or Kairos of God more than the timing or Cronus of men.”

The answer to prayer is like a dark charged up cloud touching a very tall antenna post which produces thunder and lightning. The answer to prayer is the rain that comes down from heaven. Remember that the answer to prayer was never in the antenna post but up in the dark heavy clouds.

The predestined routine of a drop of water from the glaciers of the world follow a pattern more precise than a Swiss watch. First by melting into small drops of water, then flowing in arteries and small rivers, then large rivers, then becoming the great oceans where by the power of the sun are made vapor again to become clouds again and then to travel back like salmon to where it started in an infallible, infinite and predestined routine.

You will agree with me that whether by artificial means like the tall post or a tall tree or a gigantic mountain, the clouds will make contact with Earth and then Thunderstorm and lightning will go before the rain as surely as answer to prayer will go before the petition of prayer because the clouds are not meant to be in the air forever. The clouds have an eternal predestine destiny to fulfill ordained by God.

What we need to remember is that we live in a universe where there is only one God who changes not, therefore we are not consumed.

Because God who does not change things, they have gone the way that they have done for thousands upon thousands of years.

On this background let us have a humble view of our prayers. They are only effective in direct proportion to how they coincide and agree with God’s will, with God's plans, with God's desires, and with God's designs.

In Prayer do I have to lose my identity? Yes, and gladly, because you cannot be of God and have your own identity.

You might ask, if my prayers are not that transcendental, why do I have to pray at all? If transcendentalism is what you are after, then do not pray at all. There is no room for two Gods in this universe. Beware of wanting to be like God.

There is an understanding of prayer that is very harmful and that is the view that creates the false dichotomy of “Him and Us”.

This syndrome makes me and my prayers the “powerful great arm twister of God.”

By common sense I know that at best I will end up in the proverbial dilemma of “The incredible force fighting against the unmovable object.”

The greatest divine purpose and the greatest lesson in prayer is by God having us repeat after Jesus the Lord’s prayer. By doing so you understand that our father in heaven and we are one and the same thing. Oneness with God? Yes.

Therefore, praying according to God’s will, will make us one with God and then we’re no longer asking something to a “Holy Other.” A man of Prayer is a man of God. His intimacy with God is his power. His predisposition is the closest thing to God's predisposition. You do well if you listen to a man of prayer because he or she has no agenda that competes with God's agenda for your life.

Truly, truly, I say unto you, if a man is asking for something in prayer it is like the part of the body asking the head for the common good of the body.

If we are royalty, it’s time to learn the manners of the court on earth and talk like God, talk to God in terms of God, according to the will of God and for the glory of God.

The mystery of prayer is Jesus in you who is the hope of glory. Prayer will make you as one with God as nothing else will do. Forget the syndrome that there is a God and there is us. There is only God and we are in Him.

Gerry Gutierrez

PS. The Picture is of Lois and Gerry.