How long does it take for prayer to be answered?
We should not count on the answer to prayer taking time, but we have to be willing to give it all the time it takes. There is no knowing how much time it will take.
The answer to prayer comes.
It comes as an act of God. That is, as an act of the creative Spirit that made and rules the world.
It comes, then, in the same way all creative acts come.
We pray and work, and there is no visible sign that anything is taking place. Then one day, of a sudden, the process is complete and the answer to our prayer comes forth.
This may be the way it sometimes is at Lourdes. Most of the sick who go to Lourdes go after they have tried everything else. They have done all they could with doctors and medicine; they have prayed and prayed. Sometimes this has gone on for months, even years. Many others have prayed with them. Then they go to Lourdes. And there, in an hour, almost unexpectedly, the healing takes place and the human being is whole.
This is often the way it is with those who turn to Silent Unity. Many, many times we receive word from those who write to us, saying, "You could not have had time to receive my letter—I had scarcely gotten it in the mail—before the answer to my prayer appeared."
But what a work in the invisible has preceded the appearance in the outer.
The answer to prayer comes like this in a sense, whether it appears altogether and at once, or little by little, slowly over a long time. All creative acts take place like this. This is because we do not make them happen. They happen to us and through us.
God makes creative acts happen.
Only life can bring forth a child or a flower or an answer to prayer.
Only the creative Spirit in a man can bring forth a poem or a symphony or a productive life—or an answer to prayer.
The creative human being—in any field—gives his substance, his time, his energy. He cooperates. He lets. He works to become a productive channel. Then the spark of God ignites—and the human vessel is full of life or poetry or music or healing power or new ideas.
Whether the answer to prayer comes whole, taking one prayer to produce a prodigious answer, or whether it comes piecemeal, little by little, taking ten thousand prayers to produce a very little answer—nevertheless it comes to us and through us.
We have to make ourselves a receptive vessel. Then we have to let the answer come. The light is from on high, whether it comes as lightning, in flashes and by fits and starts, or comes as the steady glowing of the dawn.
God—God only—answers prayer.
When we learn to play the piano, we are not surprised to find that it takes many years of diligent practice every day. To play certain passages, we have to practice them hundreds, thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of times. We accept this as part of learning to play. Even then, with years of daily practice, most of us do not master the instrument.
Likewise, when we set out to write, we accept the fact that we may have to practice writing for years before we can write well. Even after years, sometimes to produce ten lines of acceptable verse we have to write fifty—even a hundred—pages that are unacceptable. But if we want to write well, we are willing to do this.
But to become masters of prayer, we pray a few times and seeing no results, give up, saying, "Prayer does not work."
Yet how much more the art of prayer needs to be practiced than the pianist's or the poet's art! The human soul is intricate, strange, elusive, contradictory, subtle, full of forces we do not understand, alive with appetites, hopes, fears, dreams.
And this soul is the instrument we must learn to play if we would master prayer.
Is it hard to play a Beethoven sonata?
Is it hard to write a poem?
What then is it like to bring forth a whole body and a peace-filled mind, to fill a life with blessings, and to bless a spirit with awareness of this oneness with God's love?
How long does it take for prayer to be answered?
It does not take time at all.
It takes uniting yourself with God so that His power can work through you.
And this comes only out of praying. It is time, friend, to be at your prayers.
go back``