For my entire life, I have had a prayer habit. For my entire life, I have also been afraid of God. Not the fear full of awe. The distrustful fear of a person who has been hurt.

The God I was introduced to was never satisfied with me just the way I was. I assumed if I prayed for guidance, that when God answered, it would be with a demand for change on my part. Never mind that when I’ve actually asked for and received guidance, the most clear and meaningful messages I got were those of reassurance and acceptance.

Those learned impressions of God are really hard to shake.

I heard an interview with Julia Cameron about her new book, Seeking Wisdom, about prayer and creativity, on a podcast. I liked what I was hearing, but I was still afraid.

A book about prayer sounds like work. But my prayer life has felt flat lately (I’ll blame the depression, which makes everything flat) and as I’ve been “waking up” slowly from the grey cloud of mental illness, I’ve been more open to tuning up some of the areas of my life that deflated when I was really low.

I started listening to the audiobook, and Julia Cameron is a really relatable human. She doesn’t make you feel bad about what you do or don’t believe, she says, “I don’t care if you believe in God. Prayer will improve your life.” She says, it doesn’t matter what you call God, but I’m going to call God God. And then she tells you how to pray.

My ears pricked up when she started talking about how her process could intersect with a meditation practice. For all the things that have fallen flat, I’m still meditating, and it helps me start my day off right.

Many of Cameron’s ideas are time consuming – a morning writing practice, taking yourself out to do something Just For Fun to jump start your creativity and rest your brain. They probably work great. But I needed something I could tack onto my existing practice – meditation – without having to completely reshuffle my routine (or wake up any earlier, because morning isn’t a flowers and rainbows time for me).

Cameron suggests putting out a request for guidance about whatever is on your mind Right Now, the thing you really need an answer about. As I listened to the book, I thought, I don’t really have anything like that in my life. Just a couple of days later, though, I did.

I asked for guidance during my morning meditation and got an immediate answer. “It’s going to be OK.” No way, I thought. There must be something for me to DO. I asked again, and got the same answer. Fine, I thought. And while it felt like that answer wasn’t enough at the moment, it soaked in. I realized today that I haven’t been worried about the issue for several days.

Recently, I started a new med for rheumatoid arthritis (RA). While my previous meds meant I was immunocompromised, this new med rated me a conversation with a pharmacist about being Really Immunocompromised. That is scary, especially in a world where people are done with the pandemic and mask requirements are going out the window. I’ll have to rely solely on myself and my family to protect me from getting every Tom, Dick, and Harry virus and bacteria floating around.

In the meantime, I totally changed my diet, hoping to improve my RA and mood symptoms, and instead fixed a bunch of gut issues I didn’t know I had. The only thing I hadn’t tweaked was my sugar intake because I rely on it for mood and energy regulation, and frankly, I am probably addicted to it. My days are a steady stream of sugar all day long from my morning sweet tea to small dishes of trail mix or chocolate chips or candy all the way until bedtime.

Thanks to this new med, I bought myself a massive sinus infection which required antibiotics, and ever since the brief five-day course of augmentin (which should have a name more like “Terminator,” or “The Abominable,”) I feel like my entire body’s homeostasis has been off. I took probiotics, and prebiotics, and ate fruits, vegetables, and legumes, but I still didn’t feel right.

Lots of people talk to God about their health, praying for healing. I’ve done that for others, and probably at some point maybe even asked for myself, but never with any confidence that it would work. I must have these issues for a reason. Nothing has gotten rid of them. I have wrung the medical establishment pretty dry looking for answers, but I’d never tried asking God.

It felt like it “wasn’t God’s department.” But as I experimented with asking for  guidance about whatever issue I had Right Now, I asked what I needed to do to get my body feeling OK again after the antibiotics. I didn’t receive an answer.

I finished my meditation. I hadn’t heard any kind of answer I recognized, but somehow, I came downstairs knowing that day would be different. It was a change of outlook rather than an answer. I skipped the sweet tea, and all my sugary grazing during the day. I ate cashews instead. At four p.m., I had a little bowl of cashews and chocolate chips. I didn’t even finish it.

That was yesterday. It’s nearly 7 p.m. today and I have prepared my little bowl of cashews and chocolate chips, but I haven’t started eating the chocolate yet.

It takes several weeks to create a new habit. I am cautiously optimistic, mainly because I’ve never asked for help with this before, and I can’t remember a time when I didn’t crave sweets predictably throughout the day. I thought about sugar a lot over the past couple of days, but I didn’t crave it. It was more of a detached consideration, as with an old boyfriend or a non-emotional issue that lacked closure. Kind of a, hmm, wonder what sugar is up to? Whatever happened to chocolate chips?

According to what I’ve read, it will take at least three weeks for me to know if a diet change is making a difference in my body, which is separate from forming a new habit. I’m not eliminating sugar completely, but bringing my consumption way down. From what I’ve heard about sugar withdrawal, things may get worse before they get better. Maybe it will be less bad since I already eliminated gluten and am no longer sad and angry about it?

I asked for guidance. God didn’t tell me to change. I just received what I needed to MAKE the change.

I’ll keep listening to Cameron’s book, and ask for guidance during my meditation when I need to. Instead of feeling fear, I’m curious about what might happen as a result.

Are you thinking about things you don’t ask God about because they aren’t God’s “department”? Is it uncomfortable or scary to think about EVERYTHING being God’s department? In the framework of my own self-perception of God, it makes me a little squirmy. But if I think about my experienced perception of God, “everything” seems less worrisome.