No scientist would accept these results because I haven't accounted for repeated prayers that carry over from month to month or duplicates. With that caveat, in the past three months, the prayer "score card" is:
Yes-26
No-13
Unanswered as of yet-23
Mixed results, but leaning toward Yes-6
If you just take the Yes/No ratio, twice as many of my prayers were answered "yes" as were answered "no." Now if my math skills are correct (and they may not be), I think that means that 66% of the time, the answer was affirmative and 33% of the time it was negative.
If you take all the prayers, it seems that 38% are "yes" and 13% are "no."
Now I realize that keeping score on prayers isn't really considered good form theologically, but sometimes it's helpful to me to see things laid out clearly. I can overlook answers to prayer or forget them and simply concentrate on those things that aren't answered. So, this exercise has been helpful to me to see that God is indeed responding to my pleas...and a good deal of the time he is giving me what I ask for.
And a good deal of the time He gives us good things that we forgot to ask for or got too busy to talk to Him about. It always amazes me how He cares for the little things, as well as wants and needs.
ReplyDeleteWoodeene, I love the humor in this! Not surprising since God created funny bones and uses what amuses.
ReplyDeleteYour article seems theologically fine to me, but it might not be a matter of arithmatic so much as algebra. i.e., God often does X number of things that we don't even know about to help us, but when things go wrong, we just ask Y.
I think God has a sense of humor for sure!
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