My reflection:
“I believe God will always answer your questions and He will also answer your prayers, but many people think that the answers are always ‘yes.’ and that’s not the case. Sometimes the answer has to be ‘no’. It may not be what we want to hear, but if that’s the answer God gives, we have to accept His wisdom. I don’t believe for a moment that sometimes God doesn’t hear me or that He says ‘I’m not going to answer Mary Lou on this one.’ When I was a child, I sometimes wondered, as we all do, why God ‘didn’t answer.’ wasn’t I praying the right way? Hadn’t I been as good a girl as I could possibly be? Had he stopped loving me? As I matured in my faith, I came to see that all the times I thought God wasn’t listening, He was actually saying ‘No’ or ‘Not now, you’ll have to wait.’” Mary Lou Retton
I remember when I was principal at Saint Joe’s my mom was in ICU and all the children in the school were praying that she would get better. Unfortunately, she died. I decided that I needed to go to each classroom and thank the students for the prayers and tell them that God always listens to our prayers andsometimes God answers, “No” to our prayers.