Luke's New Journal

I've had a problem with prayer. It undoubtedly declared itself during our stay in Seattle while Andrew was in the hospital, but it has been there all along in every other topic and problem and has been since. My problem with prayer is that God will do whatever He will do, and prayer doesn't change that. Now, someone will point out all of the great answers to prayer in the Bible and I am not going to argue with them: God has answered prayers in the past. But for all points and purposes, those prayers have all been about very large problems, like nations being destroyed or extreme droughts being ended. There are no prayers in the Bible like, "Lord, please give me a good night's sleep" that have been answered. So why do we bother to pray little prayers like that? My problem with prayer is that some people would argue, "Well, sometimes God answers 'No' and sometimes he answers 'Yes,' so we should always pray in case the answer might be yes when ...

I used to play a lot of video games on the computer. I would sit down for hours at a time and play. The problem was two-fold: first, I didn't really have any control over when I would start playing. The computer would sit in the living room and basically call my name and beckon me to play, and for the most part I would sit down pretty often and answer that call. Now I knew that this was a problem, and so I told myself that I needed to play less often, and then I set up some rules like 'only play after dinner' or 'only play after chores are done' or 'only play after going outside' or 'only play after practicing piano for an hour.' But because I was immature, I would ignore the rules that I set for myself, no matter how many times I tried or how much I prayed about it or how angry I got with myself over it. The second problem was that once I started playing, I never wanted to stop. Even on weekdays, I would sometimes sit down at 9:00 PM and then play u...