In the fourth week, someone explained to me why people pray. And I stopped laughing at them.
Not because I became a believer. God forbid (pun unintended). It simply turned out that what I’d spent twenty-eight years dismissing as superstition, stupidity, and a refusal to think rationally was a crooked, skewed, garbled-by-millennia-of-broken-telephone, but technically accurate description of reality.
Like a first-grader describing quantum mechanics: “So there’s this thing, and it’s there and not there at the same time, and when you look at it, it decides what to be, and when you look away, it doesn’t care.” Crude? Yes. Imprecise? Yes. But true? In broad strokes—yes.