Last night, I prayed for my lost cat. The night before, I stopped by a church and lit a candle for him in front of St. Francis, he who loved animals. So there I was, praying as hard as I could, thinking, all I am praying for is for my cat to come home. And it's true. I can't remember the last time I prayed very hard. It's because at the back of my mind, for quite some time now, I think that God is the sort of cat owner who, when He loses a cat, shrugs it off as the nature of the animal, and thinks that the cat will eventually come back, if it wants to. I don't think he is the sort to put up flyers and ask to be let into the neighbors' yards to conduct a search.
It is not a bitter hunch. I have, after all, a better life than most. But I did get things, good or bad, that I deserved, and also a lot (both good and bad) that I didn't. As do most people. Because of this randomness, I've always silently believed that God set up our blueprints and did the construction, but once the mechanisms have latched into place, He left us all to our own wanderings, until the time to come home. If come home was what we wanted to do, that is.
This will not sit well with my mother, who I suspect is a firm believer of hell. This is the kind of thinking that will lead me straight to it. This will also not sit well with my sister, a devout Christian, who credits all her joy in life to her knowledge that she is loved by God, unconditionally. She prays, all the time, and believes that God weighs in on every conversation she opens with Him. At times, I envy my sister. It must be nice, to go through everyday thinking that Someone is rooting for you, opening and closing doors, shepherding you to a predetermined future. I would like for nothing more than to shed off all of my anxieties and pains and wind them into a ball, and hand them off to Someone to carry for a bit, while I get my bearings. But it has been hard for me to revise in my mind something that I have been whispering to myself for the longest time.
Still, despair makes us do with our entire hearts things that we only half-believe. I whispered all of my prayers out into the dark, and visualized them streaming out into the dark and wide city, eventually up into the sky, where no one is actually listening.
