on prayer, and death

Last night before going to sleep I wrote down on the pad of paper I keep beside the bed something like:

"You pray: God please keep us safe tonight
I pray: God please keep us safe tonight

I get up in the morning, put the coffee on, make some toast, have a shower, kiss my wife and child, and walk out the door to go to work, and there across the street is the smouldering charred remains of your house.

You say: it's God's Will that this happened
I say: if it's God's Will, and yet we both prayed the same thing, what's the difference? God will do what God will do. Either that, or He will allow to happen what is going to happen, regardless of what we ask."

So, I wondered, is the purpose of prayer simply to let God know that we know that He is in control? I mean, if we don't actually have a say in what He does or what happens (though there is an argument against this in Genesis 18, when Abraham pleads for mercy on Sodom ...although then in chapter 19 God does detroy the city), then we obviously have a different concept of what prayer is for, because we use it to ask for things. Made me think about "give us today our daily bread," and how maybe that's not asking God for anything, it's just telling Him we're prepared to take whatever He's going to give us...

See? It just makes things much more scary, thinking that maybe prayer doesn't serve the purpose we think it does… that it's simply submission to the Will of God, which we're told is "good and perfect."

This whole question came up a couple years ago when a close family friend became terminally ill and died very quickly, despite everyone's prayers. And yet since then, strangely, I have become much more accepting of death. Everyone dies! People die; it's part of being human.

I read somewhere recently that grief is often self-pity more than anything: not true sadness over the loss of a person, but sadness for ourselves that they have left a dark empty hole in our lives.

This obviously doesn't mean I look forward to death - either my own or that of someone close to me, but it does mean that these days when others around me are shocked at the death of someone, I kinda tend to think, "yup. death happens."

I want to add, too, that we are in fact the ones responsible for death, both in a metaphysical and in a practical way. From a Theistic POV, I'll mention the idea of "original sin," and how God's intent was never for us to die, but that we fucked it up so that now that's the cost of our lives, the consequence for choosing not to live the way He intended us to. But also, we regularly do things that cause death: screwing up the environment, eating stuff that's bad for us, driving too fast... we're all connected by death, and I think in a way we're actually the ones responsible for the deaths of one other.