Does Prayer Work?

Does prayer work? My wife and I have been involved in a church class on an unrelated subject and at the end of every class are prayer requests. Over the last 10 weeks or so I’ve seen a lot of positive reinforcement that it certainly does. Yeah, but I knew that going in. As insignificant as you might feel the CREATOR OF ALL THINGS will listen to you. Yep, you can talk to the most powerful force in the universe. And he listens. That is a powerful thing to think about.

Up Front

So you can pray but you need to know that the answers to your prayers can be “No”, or “Not Yet” or of course “Yes”. Don’t pray for a million dollars. It won’t do you any good in heaven.

My Story

This story is a few years old and certainly not the only time I’ve had a prayer answered but it is one of the most powerful. Let me feed some backstory here.

I worked for the US Government for an entity that provided emergency repair services on Aircraft Launch and Recovery Equipment for the USMC and Navy. I worked in the USMC Program. We also performed inspections and certifications. As you can imagine this scenario the USMC HATED US. Dirty civilians telling Marines what to do.

My boss exacerbated the situation by being almost impossible to bend even a little to the requests of the Marines. A couple years before this our program was funded by the Navy and they called that blue dollars. The program shifted to using green dollars which meant the USMC funded us. So the very same people who despised us now controlled our money. My boss was a scrappy little spud and had like 50 years of working knowledge. His aggressiveness and unwillingness to bend the knee made the Marines madder and madder with each passing year.

Retirement

My boss retired and I became the boss for a period of 4 months. We were doing a rotational between the 3 interested candidates.

It wasn’t long before I was summoned to Headquarters to meet with the Program Manager (the money man) and the Chief Warrant Officer who was the Liaison between the Marines and the money man.

Both of them HATED my boss. Both of them HATED me as well. So I already had received a few phone calls from some Marines who asked me what I was going to do when they defunded our program.

So there were 9 of us. I was retirement eligible and one other guy was about 1 year away from retirement.

On My Knees

Before the meeting I got down on my knees and humbled myself before my God. I begged God to give me the right things to say and that I did not care what happened to me but there were 8 other men under me who stood to lose their jobs. I begged, and begged, and begged God some more.

Then I stood up and went to work. In the meeting it was obvious that my suspicions were confirmed. The Program Manager whom I now can’t remember his name, went right where I thought he would. He went immediately for the magic number of reps and set it at 7. Okay, I can deal with this. I had already decided I would retire if it meant someone else could stay. Or I’d transfer in the Government which is something I had done several times before anyway.

So I tell our PM that I understood the cutting of costs but that we weren’t far off. I convinced him I wasn’t a factor in the numbers game and that the other guy was a year away from retiring and could we keep him one year and drop him next year. While they hated me they loved this other guy a lot. He looks at me and says “Yes”. Despite the power of the purse strings and knowing these guys wanted to crush us I was stunned at how well we came out of this.

No doubt in this old Sailor’s mind that God had indeed intervened.

A Few Months Later

I did my rotation and things went well. The man who followed me was a respected engineer in the Program and he fared well also. The next guy though really dropped the ball. Maybe I shouldn’t have said that because our boss had single handedly destroyed our program and it was just a matter of time. Rotational Boss #3 made some errors by allowing a rep who was stationed in 29 Palms CA to stay and work out of the Yuma office. Not only was this stupid it was illegal as well because the guy was drawing a higher Cost of Living Allowance (COLA) in 29 Palms. Once the Marines figured out their rep wasn’t there they completely defunded our program using that as an excuse.

I faced the same issue with the employee and basically the best thing I could do for him was to tell him that if things smelled calm on a Friday he could scoot out a little earlier to go home to his wife in Yuma. And we’d play “He’s on Leave” if anything happened. Even that was sketchy but the guy did have problems with his wife and him living away from her was tearing him to shreds. I knew how to play the game and Boss #3 didn’t. I don’t blame either guy for killing us because they were looking to cut our throats anyway.

Was My Prayer Answered?

You bet it was. I begged God as hard as I’ve ever begged for anything. I left the Meeting Of Death™ having lost nothing.

Funny Follow Up

Right after they defunded us Covid hit. Here we are with our 8 guys plus me doing NOTHING for about 18 months until our organization had the money to move us (PCS). I drew GS-13 pay, working from home for 18 months and did almost no work during that period. When they finally got funding to move us all they offered me the maximum buyout to retire. 40K. So to all the guys that hated me, and thought they were punishing me I say to them this: Keep on doing your worst because you’re giving me time off and fattening my bank account. So to them I say “Thank You”.

In the end all the other guys took another job within our organization on the Navy side of the house. I took my 40K and ran.

Despite the ultimate demise of our program I lay the fact that we survived massive cuts to us on me getting on my knees and prostrating myself before my God and begging not for me, but for the other guys to protect their jobs and families.

Was I lucky? No. I, who they hated, made a couple of suggestions in the meeting that they agreed with. John cannot do that with these men. God could though.