Hopelessness and Prayer

Hopelessness and Prayer ©

By Michael Casey

We all pray in our own way, sometimes really meaning it, and sometimes we are so full of hopelessness we cannot even pray at all, or not the kind of Prayer our priest or rabbi or imam would recognise as prayer but luckily God accepts all prayer.  Curses and oaths and tears, lots and lots of tears, and slamming doors or kicking the furniture or throwing plates against the wall, all these do happen in our distress.  Luckily God is a furniture restorer, God is good with glue too, the kind that works on all materials, Love is his glue.

So why am I talking about this tonight? Well house hunting is a very emotional process and it does make you curse when your hopes and dreams are dashed. You were a nanosecond late and so you miss your chance to get a nice house. It can be that competitive in certain streets, you really do have to put notes through letterboxes saying “ I want to live in this street, sell me your house” The householder just thinks it’s a Pizza Company wanting to buy your house and turn it into a pizza parlour, you get so many leaflets for pizza after all.

Your head is down you team has lost that match and you skipped class to travel to watch your team, now you’ve lost 2 days study time, and if you don’t pass you’ll not get into the best university. All because you followed such a dumb team, and you are dressed in green and orange the team’s colours. So on the bus home, you could not afford to fly, so you are on a bus for 20 hours and are trying to revise. God help me and I’ll start going to church again just please help me revise and pass the test.

A Chinese girl gets on the bus and she sits next to you, she is just too pretty, how can you revise when she is just too much temptation for you. You try and hide behind your physics book. Thanks God, you really do have an evil sense of humour, then the girl taps on your physics book to tell you she likes the colours, and are you Irish perhaps? You laugh and try and hide behind the physics book, you look upwards, God if you were here besides me I’d smack you in the mouth. Somebody ahead causes the bus to do an emergence stop, so the Chinese girl is flung against you.

Just like Physics she says as you  both move apart reluctantly, God what are you trying to do to me you think, but God is like Physics he moves in mysterious ways. The Chinese girl spontaneously squeezes your muscles, I like strong men, you are chewing your Wrigleys and nearly choke on it. Yes just like physics you reply trying to look into her eyes, and not any lower.

I like Physics too, I’m doing my PhD, adds the Chinese girl. Now God really is taking the Mick. So you know what MC=4C means, you say, the Chinese girl explains it. God has answered all his prayers. So they spend the rest of the journey talking Physics. She gives him a master class in Physics, he was in despair and with no Hope at all and God had sent him a pretty Chinese PhD student in Physics.

At the end of the journey he was at least A minus as far as the test would say when he took it. Though for the Chinese girl this would be a disgrace and her parents would ashamed of her if she got such a low mark, distinction or nothing. The Chinese girl had decided she would make him her husband, though she only told him boyfriend, she did not want to frighten him after all, Chinese make decisions very fast after all.

Now some would say this tale is just beyond belief, but speaking as somebody who spent all his time, 3 years every single day visiting  the seniors home hoping against hope that dad would stay alive, then where did my own Chinese future wife appear? And yes I really was vetted by a Chinese Ballerina from the Birmingham Royal Ballet.

So do say some prayers when things are utterly hopeless, besides the fridge next to a photo of your dead mum might be a good place to pray from. Though I will tell you all  the real answer to MC=4C its Physics  in a way, it means Michael Casey equals 4 Chinese people, because I used to weigh as much as my wife, my mother-in-law and my 2 infant children, which gives you  MC=4C. You can try that as a chat up line to your Chinese girls in your Physics class. And if they don’t become your girlfriend, tell them they will make your Panzi friend cry, and the will tell you what Panzi means.