Dear God, I wish I was thinner.
Dear God, I wish she loved me back.
Dear God, please let me get into college.
3,291,483. That’s how many emails I get–on average–every day. They don’t always come in the form of emails. Sometimes paper letters. Sometimes the smaller ones are texts. Sometimes telegrams, faxes, Morse code. Once even hand-delivered by a herald.
Usually, they’re funny. Little mortals running around up there with their mortal issues. Make me skinny, make me funny, make me pretty, make me rich. Me, me, me.
Sometimes, they’re jarring. Make me dead was one I receive absurdly often. Whenever I get one of those, I try to send down an angel, or an omen. Something. But sometimes, I just don’t get around to it. That’s never pretty.
Other times, they’re surprisingly sobering. Dear God, this will be our last correspondence. I don’t believe in you anymore. Those do give me pause a lot of the time. Sometimes, I even follow up.
But I hate writing emails. So most of them go unanswered.
I don’t get many prayers from the sort of people you’d expect. Not many white, churchgoing, Bible Belt soccer moms in my inbox. No, most of them are soldiers. Dear God, please let me see her again. High schoolers and college students. Dear God, let me figure out what I’m going to do for the rest of my life. Doctors and paramedics. God, let him live. Let me do this right. Doing things right seems to be a theme with many of these prayers. New parents, for example. God, let me raise him right. Let me handle this well.
But let me tell you a secret.
A lot of the time, the people who contact me, the ones feeling lost and lonely, the ones who think they can’t make it another day?
They do pretty well on their own. Without me.