Does God answer prayer?  Ah, such a loaded question.  In her novel No Graven Image, well known missionary Elisabeth Elliot, who died last year, deals with it poignantly.  She tells the story of a missionary in the field tending to the medical needs of the severely underresourced population among whom she worked.  To help one sick person, she gives him penicillin, and prays.  All too soon, however, this person dies of anaphylactic shock while the missionary stands by helplessly.
     The obvious question comes immediately to mind:  why did God not heal?  Did not Jesus heal?  Did not Jesus promise that, "whatever you ask for in my name I will do?"
     To both questions, we must answer yes.  Yet we must consider three other things as well.  One, as I mentioned a few days ago, God is not a slot machine.  Two, to view God as purveyor of goodness quite apart from the patterns of the world he made is to miss the point of humanness.  God blesses, yes, but God blesses in a broken world.  Three, to make blessings the whole point of belief is to, in fact, deny it.  It is to forget that belief is at its core a relationship, a relationship of trust.  We trust God, God trusts us.  Both of us are working in a bent world.  Neither of us changes what is there; we express who we are in it.
     And we believe.  We believe in the world, we believe in God.  We believe that we can trust, we trust that we can believe.  We trust that God is exactly who he, in Jesus, claimed to be:  a love that surpasses knowledge, a love ever present, yet a love that, for now, is not fully knowable.
     It is a love, however, worth knowing.  It is a love that is eternal.