God Doesn’t Need Your Prayers

One of the things about being a black, Southern woman is that people expect you to be a true Bible-quoting, church-going sister. I almost hate to disappoint them. It would be a comfort to have such unshakable faith in … all that.

I was certainly subject to religious training in my youth, but I was also fortunate that my family was pretty relaxed about such matters. When I got to my teen years, I was allowed to opt out of churchgoing. So even though I love the radical Jesus of my understanding and was baptized in the Baptist Church AND went to Catholic School for nine years, I am not a Christian.

Jesus is not my savior; Jesus is my teacher.

To believe that I need to be saved is to believe that I came into the world wrong. But the Creator I know doesn’t make mistakes. They order the world and I am part of that order and not the central figure in it. A being of that power doesn’t care whether I worship them.

God doesn’t need your prayers.

But you do. It would be a cruel Creator that required you to stroke their ego. Thankfully, prayer has a more powerful purpose than that. Prayer opens individuals to the divine presence that is always available. It is a conversation that unites you with what Eckard Tolle calls the “totality.”

And if you listen just as much as you talk during that conversation, the quiet certainty of the divine will find you.