Chapter 11: Dreams, Prayer, Out-of-Body Experiences and Meditation
You Have Chosen to Remember: A Journey of Self-Awareness, Peace of Mind and Joy by James Blanchard Cisneros.
37 I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I have nowhere else to go.
– Abraham Lincoln
My father figure was my grandmother, a very old-fashioned, tough Latina woman from Venezuela. To illustrate how tough she was, she was read her last rights in April 2001 and passed away on March 20, 2002. She was the type of woman who believed in spanking – hard spanking, I might add. Well, maybe it was a little more than spanking. My grandmother was well versed in her ability to use any available tool, belt or shoe to make her point. People in this country call it child abuse, but back then we were told that it was discipline.
When I was young, I remember praying many nights to God to make me big, so that the hitting and spanking wouldn’t hurt so much. Well, I got what I prayed for; by the time I was in fifth grade I was almost six feet tall, and about 220 pounds. To say the least, I was very grateful to God for making me physically large. But I then began to notice the sizeable difference in height and weight between myself and my classmates. I began to worry that I might not have set very clear parameters. Maybe God misunderstood; maybe He was making me too big. So I started praying again, but this time using clearer parameters. I reminded God that my intent was never to be ten feet tall and one thousand pounds which was, at the time, where I truly believed I was headed. I started praying for my growth to stop. Since then, I have grown only four inches and I have remained around 220 pounds. For a young man, that first experience with prayer was pretty dramatic, and it demonstrated to me that someone was indeed listening and assisting. The next story that I will share also reinforces my belief that God really answers prayers.
37. Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln Observed: The Civil War Dispatches of Noah Brooks edited by Michael Burlingame (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 210.
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