Un-Learning Helplessness

So I have this really awkward "I haven't posted on here in forever and this feels really familiar and yet really strange" feeling. It's weird, but I've felt like I needed to write on here for a few days now...to the point that I would log in, type a line, delete it, and then log out (this happened four times). I'll honestly be surprised if I actually end up posting this. (One of my professors always says, "How about dishonestly?" when he hears someone preface a statement with the word honestly. And now whenever I say it I get this Holden Caufield-like feeling that I'm just a phony.)

Things right now are weird. Everything is weird - on a macro-level and a micro-level. I'm about to give up on reading the news because it just depresses me. But it feels like everything is weird on a personal level too. For everyone.

A few months ago I was talking with a friend about prayer and she said something that I had always felt but had never quite had the courage to vocalize: "Prayer just doesn't seem to work fast enough."

I feel that now, more than ever. This morning in church as I prayed for a family friend who had lost her son in a car accident last night, I found myself getting a defeatist attitude. I just want to feel like my prayers are actually doing something - like they're actually worth the breath required to speak them.

I'm taking Abnormal Psychology this semester and it's screwing with my mind (for that matter, all of my classes are doing that this semester, but that's a story for another place and time). A few classes ago we talked about the principle of learned helplessness. Some guy (whose name I should remember but don't) did an experiment with dogs where he tied them up (or caged them or something) and he shocked them. At first the dogs tried to get away, but eventually they learned to be helpless. So when the guy untied (or uncaged or whatevered) them, they didn't run away when he shocked them, even though they could have.

As I studied for that class tonight and remembered that principle, I realized that even though prayer doesn't seem to work fast enough, that doesn't mean that it doesn't work. And that also doesn't mean that it always works more slowly than I want it to. Maybe the answers to my prayers come at times and in ways that I don't realize or recognize. 

Also I'm going to actually post this because I ended up with some half decent thoughts that are far less confusing than they were when they were in my head.