Why Does It Take Time For Some Prayers To Be Answered?

We pray, all of us; intentionally or unintentionally. You may wonder 'unintentionally? how?' Well, I think when we say "Oh I really hope blah blah blah happens" that's really a prayer in disguise.

We pray for and over everything but sometimes we wonder why does it take so much time for some prayers to be answered? And I am talking about the important prayers here, the urgent ones, the make-or-break situation/prayers, life defining ones.

We pray for our sick parents, dying parents, siblings, our family members who may be in distress, who may have an operation, have a crisis on-hand. We pray for ourselves. We may be sick, we may be dying, we may have a really tough paper the next day, we have the result coming of  a very tough yet a very important exam. We pray for friends who may be going through similar situations as mentioned.

We turn to God, we pray. We have faith and we really wish for these prayers to be answered. Why wouldn't we? These are matters of utter urgency. A dying parent, anyone in surgery, exam(s) that determine your entire career. And sometimes we see a delay; everything at a pause. Nothing happening. Your parent is still sick, the family member still making no recovery, the bad grade, the distressed friend and we question why haven't these been answered? I wasn't asking for an iPhone or a new house, this was beyond urgent and important and God knows that. And we pray again. We wish. We hope.

We often pray in grief, and there are 5 very well knows stages of grief. Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance.

We pray when we are in denial, we turn a blind eye to the truth and get into the 'wishful-miracle thinking' mode. We become angry; we question God, we question His ignorance, we question our motives, we may stop praying but we never cease to hope. We bargain, we offer up everything in exchange, we offer up our souls for a chance of our prayer to be heard, for God to change His plan and grant us the lifeline. We become depressed, we start to understand the failure but we never lose hope, our strong hope and willpower keeps us at it. We accept, we say He knows best but we are secretly angry and secretly depressed, we don't prefer the loss of a parent, the loss of a loved one, the loss of a career or a year of hard work, we just can't.

Some things make sense, some we understand; some are just down dead hilarious and unacceptable.
The loss breaks us. We may lose faith,w e lose hope, we don't find a way to continue.

Picture Credit: berlin-artparasites on facebook. Artwork by Harriet Lee-Merrion Illustration

So why is it? Why does it take time for some prayers to be heard? We prayed. We have/had faith at the highest of degree known to us, we offer up our souls.
-Nobody knows. If you have answers other than 'God's plans' and 'God knows best' please let me know.