God and answered prayers
The idea for today’s column deserves proper attribution: my wife told me about a poignant scene in the Steve Carell movie Evan Almighty, in which God, appearing as Morgan Freeman, talks to US Congressman Evan’s wife, played by Lauren Graham. As a backgrounder, Evan (Carell), a member of the US Congress, was instructed by God to build an Ark in preparation for the Great Flood. From a well-dressed, successful and handsome legislator, Evan slowly physically transforms, against his will, into a modern-day Noah complete with scruffy beard, homespun robe, and staff. Naturally, everyone thinks that Evan has lost his marbles and so the wife decides — or is on the brink of deciding — to leave him. This is when the heavens intervene and Freeman/God persuades Graham to stand by her husband by reminding her that she had always come to him asking for love and strength. Well, God was now giving her the chance to show her love and her strength by supporting her husband. The point that was raised in that scene, about God answering our prayers by giving us opportunities (often through crises and problems) to show our love and inner strength resonated with me.
One truth has become crystal clear to me in my 15 years of legal practice: everyone, from the richest to the poorest person, has problems. There is no such thing as a person totally free of worries and difficulties. Of course I deal mostly with legal problems like annulments, criminal cases, debts, etc. but the reality is that these legal difficulties are rooted in real personal problems. Husbands and wives fighting, businesses shutting down, people running away with other people’s money, among others, are the matters that I handle on a daily basis. The takeaway is that, on a larger scale, all of us — from CEOs of billion-peso industries to the simple janitor who cleans our office space — have crosses to bear. However, what we have to remember is that these problems are also, in truth, occasions for us to show our inner strength.
In Islam, there is a saying that God does not give a soul a burden that it cannot bear. What this really means is that whatever problems we face, we have the interior power to face and solve them. On a concrete and personal level, when I ran for the Senate and lost, I was greatly disappointed, humbled, and embarrassed. At my lowest point, I was even ashamed to be seen in public. In the past, I had always accomplished the things I set out to do — become a lawyer, publish a law book, take my master’s in law at Harvard, etc. — and to fail on such a giant, national stage was a painful experience. Fortunately, I didn’t wallow in self-pity and I found the fortitude to raise myself up, and later re-focus on my family and career. Deep inside I knew, because of my Islamic faith, that I had the power to get over my failure and start anew.
It is in the midst of our biggest personal dilemmas that we turn in prayer to God.
When I was cam-paigning during the elec
tion period, I kept praying to God for success. When I lost, I was angry at him for letting me down. For not giving me what I wanted. Later I realized that God truly answers all our prayers but sometimes His answer is a big, fat “No.” Very often the thing that we desire most, that we fervently pray for, and that we believe will bring us true happiness may be the worst thing for us. In the course of my involvement in politics, I had lost my family focus and forgotten that my core strength lay in my abilities as an educator and legal professional and not as a politician. Truth be told, I was a lousy politician and I turned into a bit of a jerk during my political period. This may seem like sour-graping but I think that if I had won, then I would have become even far worse. So my losing may have been, ironically, the best thing to happen to me. My loss — and subsequently rebuilding my life and career after the loss — also allowed me to tap into my reserves of strength and personal fortitude. I’m humbled now but I’m also braver and stronger — and maybe a little less of a jerk than I was before.
Part of why I wanted to run for public office is because I’ve always been ambitious. Ambitious in the sense that I’ve perpetually believed that there was something very important that I was created to do. It sounds like delusions of grandeur — maybe it is — but I’ve always thought that I was meant to do great things. In the past, I thought that the great thing that I would do involved politics. My political failure has made me reconsider and I’m starting to realize that maybe the great thing I’m meant to do may lie somewhere else. It may be something as seemingly simple as being a good father. Perhaps raising my son, Santi, who has autism, and being a good dad to his brother, Mike, is the great endeavor that I’ve been created for. Anyway, what is great and important to God may be very different from what mortals perceive as significant.
Finally, there is only one class of people that have absolutely no more earthly problems. And you’ll find them all in the cemetery. Being alive necessarily means that you will have problems, dilemmas and failures. Someone told me that Herodotus said to call no man happy until he is dead. In a sense that may be true but I take the opposite approach: rejoice in your problems and in your failures! They provide you with the occasion to show your inner fortitude and true character. Also, it means that you are still alive and our life — imperfect and problem-filled as it is — is the greatest blessing of all.
