Yesterday my brother tinkered with my house’s new fibre optic wifi modem and for some inexplicable reason, my computer can’t pick up the wifi. So I keep re-scanning and re-scanning for it but to no avail. I was so frustrated that, in a fit of exasperation, I prayed to God to help me fix my wifi. I guess he wasn’t too impressed because the wifi still wasn’t fixed. So I wondered what to do and finally I decided to switch from the wifi back to my power-line network which I thought would be slower.

So I decided to test the speed of my power-line network and to my surprise, I discovered that it was actually much faster and much more stable than using my wifi and if my wifi didn’t fail, I would have never discovered this.

Well, thank God he didn’t answer my prayers. It reminds me of a Hans Christian Andersen story about a mother who journeyed far and wide to rescue her child from Death. Eventually when she met with Death, Death showed her two possible futures, one where a child grows up happy and successful, the other where the child suffers through much misery and poverty, and told her that of the two children, one of them is her. The mother than cries out in horror and tells Death to deliver the miserable child from life and take it away to the Kingdom of God. Death then appears confused and asks her if she wants her child back or to let her child remain with him. Eventually the mother sinks to her knees and prayed, “Grant not my prayers, when they are contrary to Thy will, which at all times must be the best. Oh, hear them not…” and with that Death took her child with Him to the Kingdom of God.

Eventually, I am reminded of this collect from the Book of Common Prayer:

ALMIGHTY God, the fountain of all wisdom, who knowest our necessities before we ask, and our ignorance in asking; We beseech thee to have compassion upon our infirmities; and those things, which for our unworthiness we dare not, and for our blindness we cannot ask, vouchsafe to give us, for the worthiness of thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.