Thanksgiving For Unanswered Prayers

Back in 2008, when I was studying to be a spiritual director at Monastery Immaculate Conception in Ferdinand, we had a special guest one weekend.

Her name was Sister Olga Wittekind. She was a Franciscan sister who was also a clinical psychologist. She had studied at the Jung Institute in Zurich.

Her expertise was dream therapy.

It was a wonderful weekend, and my classmates and I learned so much.

She taught us about the work of Craig Mueller, who wrote an essay entitled “Dreams and Spiritual Direction.” He believes that dreams are  “gifts from God” that can propel us to a deeper faith.

That weekend, we were reminded that the Scriptures are filled with stories of dreams. Jacob had one. So did Pharaoh and King Solomon. Even Joseph, the father of Jesus, was led by dreams. We are told he was encouraged to take Mary as his wife in a dream, and also guided in dreams to flee to Egypt and then return home to Nazareth.

Dreams seem to be one of the ways that God communicates with His people.

One of the things that I learned about during that weekend was the concept of Carl Jung’s archetypes. He theorized that certain dream symbols possess the same universal meaning for all men and women, and he tagged this “the collective unconscious.”

Sister Olga explained to us that often, when there is a house in a dream, it is a symbol of the dreamer.

For years, I’ve had dreams about a small run-down house in an unpleasant locale. Sometimes when I see the house in a dream I have pointed to it and said, “I want that.”

I had the dream a few weeks ago; but when I woke up this time, I had a revelation — and it made me laugh.

In my light-bulb moment I realized that the house represented my unanswered prayers, those things that I thought I needed over the years.

A few days later, I listened as someone talked about the unanswered prayers in her life. She was shaking her head as she remembered all of the prayers that she had so fervently prayed in her 20s, in her 30s, in her 40s — and about how they were still floating around somewhere — unanswered. Then she mentioned how relieved she was that God in His wisdom had said, “No.”

I began to think of the prayers that I had offered up as a teenager and as a young woman in my 20s. Some were silly prayers, some were selfish prayers, some were frivolous prayers, and God in his all-knowing-ness didn’t answer them. I realized that they were prayers that —  if answered —  would have propelled me on such a different trajectory that my life today would have been unrecognizable.

In my ignorance and folly, I had spent so much of my time seeking residence in a shabby house on a hill, demanding, “I want that,” while God was carefully and lovingly building a beautiful place for my soul to reside.

I don’t for a moment believe that He ignored my prayers. I do believe that He knew better.

And I am so grateful for unanswered prayers.