Help With Prayer - If God Knows Everything, Why Should I Pray?
In some sense, it seems that God knowing everything would make prayer of any kind irrelevant. Perhaps you've had the discussion: "If God already knows what is best, won't He do that regardless of what I say to Him?" This particularly becomes an issue if we think of God in Platonic terms - the Unmoved Mover, the All-Knowing, the One Who Always Does What He Has Determined From Before All Time That He Will Do. I'm not convinced, though, that is how God thinks of Himself. On a Tuesday evening in late August 2001 at the Village Vanguard in Greenwich Village, Wynton Marsalis was soloing on the ballad "I Don't Stand a Ghost of a Chance with You." Just as he reached the climax of his solo, a cell phone rang in the audience - and he lost them. The audience started to chatter, and a critic wrote on his notepad in capital letters, "MAGIC RUINED!" In his book, Finding the Groove, Robert Gelinas notes, "Marsalis improvised. He played the notes of