Heavenly fatherliness #4 - Lending an ear

According to popular wisdom, a good father takes time to listen to his children and have a good, easy, and genuinely interested chat with them.

God's got this one nailed, right? Our Heavenly Father always hears and answers our prayers! He's just sitting by waiting to talk to us, listen to us, and comfort us. He's such a good dad!

Or maybe, if you dismiss the warm, reassuring rhetoric of the LDS Church and actually consider the logistics, the situation starts to smack of pure comedy.

Ok, I know, I know! He's God! He obviously has the means to receive all prayers and hearts' desires, to keep them all in context, to care about even the most mundane and empty of requests and praises, and to do something about them. So let's move on to what we don't know.

We have absolutely no way of knowing God's prayer answering stats. How's he doing? I say no one knows when or how God is answering your prayers, not even our wisest of religious leaders. Go ahead and talk with your trusted spiritual giants and ask about the answering of prayers. The best you'll get is some trite little breakdown of how God sometimes responds right away and sometimes He wants us to wait. It's all very personal depending on what we really truly need. Or maybe he's just busy taking other calls. Leaders and lay people alike realize that getting a good connection to Our Old Man can be challenging to say the least.

We should also consider the possibility that the Father doesn't give two shits about anything we have to say. Let's face it, we can't tell him anything he doesn't already know. On top of that, maybe it's time we recognized that "that which is highly esteemed among men is abomination in the sight of God" (Luke 15:16). So stop praying for your child's health, stop praying for a stable income for you family, stop praying for guidance for your political leaders, stop praying for peace and understanding in the world. It's abominable! Start talking to God more about the stuff that he highly esteems: Himself. What a wonderful father, right?

*These attributes represent the popular thoughts of Ask Men’s Jullian Marcus, examiner.com’s Tanya Tringali, and Open Talk Magazine’s Glenn Silvestre as per their respective articles on what makes a good father.