Sink or Swim: God's Odd Answers to Our Prayers

She was 18 and sitting on her bed alone in her room, five different scraps of paper laid out on her mattress before her, each inscribed with a different family’s name. Her hands grasping her baby growing within, Kelly groaned from the depths of her soul, begging God to reveal His will. “Lord, I am asking you to help me chose the family to whom I should give my daughter!” She chose to keep her baby until birth, but this heroic decision needed to be followed by another: to which family should Kelly offer her child?

Her sorrowful prayer came from a place of love and hope for her daughter, yearning that this daughter might have the life that Kelly knew she couldn’t provide. Suddenly, fear left her, and a sense of calm and confidence came over her; Kelly now felt certain that God wanted her to choose this particular family who could raise Lisa, the baby she would deliver in a few weeks. “Troy,” she recounted to me, tears streaming down her face, “I am struggling so much of what happened on that day, replaying it over and over in my mind, examining those scraps of paper with the names written on them, recalling my prayer that morning. What went wrong? What did I do wrong?”

Kelly pleaded with me for answers, answers she wanted, perhaps even deserved, as her life is plagued now with doubt and guilt because of how the story ends. This baby Lisa, now grown, didn’t have the life Kelly hoped for after all. Lisa, age 35, died by drug over-dose a few months prior.

The family whom Kelly chose for her baby ended up abusing Lisa physically, emotionally, and sexually throughout her formative years. They neglected her spiritually, even though the dad was an ordained minister. They even cooperated in her drug use by driving her to her dealer’s house! Finally, the family totally disintegrated with divorce, breaking up what little stability the family had. Lisa escaped this trauma and confusion by fleeing further and further into the world of sex and drugs, culminating in her own over-dose. “Why didn’t God answer my prayer?” Through her sobs and vivid emotions, I sat there staring blankly at my friend’s question, hoping to camouflage the stunned look on my face. What was I supposed to say? I knew that Kelly was struggling with pain with the recent loss of Lisa, but I had no idea how much pain, nor how to address the question with which she just confronted me. ‘Well, I guess God failed to answer your prayer, but mostly He does answer…’ Or, ‘You just didn’t pray hard enough…’ Or ‘God may have willed your daughter to endure such suffering because He sometimes offers tough love…’ I knew one answer was as terrible and unsatisfying as the next, but I was dumbfounded. If those weren’t the right answers, what was?

In the midst of this struggle for an answer and my own prayer on what to say, the word of the Lord came to me, “To whom much is given, much will be expected.” (Lk 12:48.) This phrase made little sense to me, even as it entered my mind, until I reversed it, ‘to whom little is given, little will be expected.’ Perhaps hidden in this riddle was an answer Kelly and I least expected.

Our Lord knows the depths of our heart and the necessities of our life from the depths of His own wisdom and richness. (and how inscrutable are His ways! cf. Rom 11:33-ff.) I shared with my friend the following possibility, but one that seems to make the most sense, given the situation: perhaps God knew that Lisa, in being adopted by such a dysfunctional family, would need little in way of faith and prayer from others for her own salvation, since so little was given to her. Further, He knew that perhaps had she been given a better family, Kelly may not have spent so many years praying for Lisa.
“This all sounds fine and good,” Kelly objected, “but I have always struggled so much with trust. This doesn’t make sense,” she pleaded, “that God would put Lisa in such a tenuous situation!” A poor adoptive family and a birth mom who was struggling so badly with trusting God meant that Lisa had no chance. And this revelation clarified for me some of the core of Kelly’s angst: In addition to the profound pain of loss, Kelly believed Lisa’s plight was all her fault, and she feared somewhere deep inside her… God agreed.

When we pray, I told her, especially for others, we must remember that God also wants our good, and sees our needs as well. Knowing Kelly’s struggles with confidence and doubt both in herself and in Him, I explained, perhaps He placed her in a situation where she had to sink or swim. For instance, its quizzical that that Jesus gave Judas the betrayer the money bag to watch over, even though Jesus had to have known that Judas was a thief (Jn 12:6.)

Then it dawned on me that Jesus did this for a moral purpose; He wanted to test Judas in order to help him. The Hebrew word for test—nassah—also means to prove. Jesus was allowing Judas to prove himself, knowing his moral weaknesses, by allowing him to be in a position where he would be forced either to admit to the Lord his need in the face of such constant temptation, or to succumb, thus paving the way for his final undoing. Jesus gave Judas the chance to learn to swim, or to sink. Perhaps the Lord offered Kelly the same opportunity.

As we discussed the situation further, Kelly began to see that in her life, despite struggles, she and her family were persevering in faith and prayer. I expressed to her my admiration for both she and her husband since both spend mornings and evening together in prayer. That commitment to prayer as a couple is better than most married couples I know.

To strengthen her weakness in trust, maybe the Lord put her in this position. Since Lisa was given so little by way of moral and spiritual direction, perhaps Jesus knew that the hurdles she needed to overcome for salvation would be greatly mitigated, and as Kelly persevered in prayer, not only would her trust grow, but her prayers and their effectiveness would grow as well. Maybe Lisa would have perished had she been in a better family due to some character flaw that we’re unaware of? This dysfunctional family might have been her saving grace!

This is one of the messages of Fatima that I find most astonishing, that Our Lady asked three small children for prayers and penances for souls that otherwise would perish forever! With prayers and penances from these three visionaries, however, souls would be saved. If this were true for them as they prayed for strangers, how much truer would it be for Kelly’s prayers for her own daughter? God who lives outside of time can apply those constant graces at that moment when her daughter most needed them.

By the time our conversation ended, Kelly realized that her life, despite of all the struggles, was one of overcoming. She learned to swim, even upstream, and her faith life was proof positive of that fact. She told me she felt uplifted now and appreciated seeing things in a different light.

When I recounted this conversation to my wife later that day, she chuckled. She told me that on New Year’s Day, Kelly visited Jennifer Fulwiler’s website which generates both a saint and a word for the year for one’s own reflection and growth. My family visits this site every New Year’s to pick our new saint and word for the year (jenniferfulwiler.com.) Kelly did the same this year. Her word for the year (picked a couple months ago)…Swim! My word for the year…Lift! I hope this true story lifts your spirits when faced with deep struggles, that you may swim in faith, despite the onrush of confusing outcomes!