“Your Prayer Will Be Handled By The Next Available Angel”

“Please stay on the line, and keep kneeling.”

Photo by Medialink Comunicação & Marketing on Flickr

The congregation of a Michigan church believes God has ceased answering their prayers. They initially assumed it was due to supply chain problems. That God had run out of give-a-damns.

The church is Gills Pier Presbyterian. It’s located on the Leelanau, a peninsula in Michigan’s Up North known for vast cherry orchards, miles of Lake Michigan beaches, and a low ass-in-pew ratio. Forty percent of its 22,000 residents are religious. But only half of those attend church at least once a month.

The Gills Pier Presbys are in particularly dire straits. Theirs is the smallest congregation on the peninsula. And getting smaller. Last year, the church averaged ninety souls per worship service. This year, they’re down to eighty. There’s no mystery as to why. God isn’t answering their prayers.

The Presbys aren’t talking about piddling prayers. Like saying “God give me courage” before a bungee jump. That’s the same as when an atheist tells themselves “You got this.”

No, they’re referring to prayers people utter when they need God to come through for them. Such as when they pray:

For good fortune. “God, my date is wearing a tight dress with no VPL. Let that mean I’m not the only one who’s hoping to get lucky tonight.”
For safe passage. “Please God, let me go straight upstairs to my room and put on panties, so Mom won’t find out I came home from my date without them.”
For a miracle. “Dear Lord, don’t let the grey water bubbling up through the grass in my yard mean the hundred guests here for my daughter’s wedding have overfilled the septic tank.”
For strength. “God, I’ve got the clap. I’ll visit the Student Health Center tomorrow. But right now, I gotta wiz. When I do, and it feels like I’m peeing red-hot needles, give me the strength to resist ripping the urinal off the wall.”
To avoid embarrassment. “God, grant me the opportunity to undress with the lights off, so my date won’t see that I’m wearing Spanx®.
To avoid temptation. “Lord, it took me two hours to clean the kitchen. Help grandma and grandpa resist the urge to grab more strawberries and chocolate sauce, and ‘do it’ on the island again.”
To remain innocent. “Lord, help the jury find me not guilty. Nobody saw me bite that guy’s ear off. So all you gotta do is make them forget the witness who saw me spit it out.”
For knowledge. “Lord, please finish the background check before my son has a second date. On the woman who showed up for his first in a plaid Catholic school girl micro-mini. Black fishnet stockings. A white tank top with a black-corseted Barbie brandishing a bullwhip on the front. “Blood Is My Lipstick” in big black letters across the back. And face paint which made her appear to have stitched flesh, rotting skin, and blood streaming from the sides of her mouth.

God didn’t answer these prayers. Nor others made by the Presbyterians.

They decided to find out why. They did drill-downs. Made Pareto charts. Performed a Fault Tree Analysis. Created a Fishbone diagram. When they were done, the results were clear: it was God’s fault.

First, the way He wants prayers transmitted is problematic. Parishioners can only utter them. In other words, they do live chat. If no one’s on the heavenly end, the prayer gets lost in the ether.

Second, He jumps into the solution space too soon. The Presbys get it. God hears a lot of prayers. He falls behind. To catch up, He’ll hear part of a prayer, think He knows where it’s going, and answer it. That doesn’t always work. God heard the first part of a mother’s plea: “I overheard my daughter tell a friend she’s like a ‘run-on sentence.‘“ God immediately answered her prayer by dividing the daughter’s clauses into separate sentences. He’d have answered differently if He’d heard the second part: “She’s got no period.”

God needs to ask questions. True, He’s all-knowing. But He didn’t know what a woman wanted when she said “Lord, I just streamed Fifty Shades of Grey. Bless me with vibrator batteries having plenty of juice.” Remember, God’s cheap. He fed 5,000 people with just five loaves and two fish (Matthew 14:14–20). So naturally, He answered the woman’s prayer by putting crummy alkaline batteries into her Premium Rabbit. That’s enough for nub-rubbing. But not for vigorous thrusting and twisting — which is what the woman had in mind. Had God known that, He’d have put heavy-duty lithium Energizers in her selfie stick.

Finally, when God doesn’t know the answer to a prayer, He guesses. Bad idea. A man prayed “Oh God, I’ve got warts on my genitals. Tell me where they came from.” God didn’t know to check the man’s sexual history. So He went with what he knew about getting warts. He put a toad in the guy’s tighty-whities.

The Presbyterians decided that God needs to use prayer management best practices. Drop the “live chat.” Instead, have people phone their prayers in to a Heavenly call center.

It’ll need decent call center software. Starting with call routing, so seraphs, cherubs, angels, and archangels can help answer prayers. That will be a problem; God’s a control freak. Getting Him to delegate prayer-answering will be a major battle during the Change Management process.

The software must be cloud-based. Because duh, the call center is in Heaven.

It must have an interactive voice response capability. That will allow parishioners to speak with an automated system, which will route their prayers to the appropriate team members.

Fortunately, God can get PMS off the shelf. (That’s prayer management systems.) HubSpot, for instance, offers one which already has the phone menu prompts. Including the:

Main Menu. “Thank you for praying to God. To create a new prayer, press 1. To change or cancel a prayer, press 2. To check the status of a prayer, press 3. To return the Answer To Your Prayer, press 4. To speak to a customer service angel, press 5. To repeat these options, press 9.
New Prayer Menu. “To pray for strength, press 1. For guidance, press 2. For success, press 3. To win the lottery, press 4. For a miracle, same button. For forgiveness, press 5. For a get-out-of-Hell card, press 666. For all other prayers, press 9.”
Saint Menu. “If you wish to pray to the patron saint associated with your issue, and know their extension, dial that now. Otherwise, stay on the line, and the next available angel will be with you shortly.”

This software provides your basic Oh Hold message. “Thank you for holding. All our angels are answering other prayers. If you want to leave a prayer, press 1. If you want an angel to call you back, press 2. Otherwise, stay on the line, and someone will be with you as soon as possible.” This feature has one flaw. During the intervals between messages, the system plays Muzak from Hell.