10th August – thank you for your prayers!

Man, of late I have been busy! Today I thought I might get an early night (ie, going to bed before 2 am) but then I remembered that I have been wanting to write this post. At any rate I watched YouTube videos until 2 am anyway, and it is now past 2.45 am as I begin to write this! Hopefully though it will be brief so hopefully I should finish not long after 3 am…

Because I have been so busy I have been mentally procrastinating about writing this post. I have to say such a huge, huge “thank you” to anyone out there who is praying for me. Actually I am pretty sure I know who it is…or at least one of the people praying, if there is more than one.

In my last post I ranted at length about my internet service provider, and how poor the service was. I actually have a correction to make to that. I said that the service was at a ratio of 8:2 down versus up. Well I would like to revise that. At the time of writing it was actually far worse than that, perhaps 19:1 down versus up. I am not exaggerating, it was awful. At times it would seem to flicker on but by the time I managed to open my browser to click onto a website it would have gone down again, after a matter of mere seconds.

Well what I am about to relate to you has left me in a state of pure incredulity.
After I wrote that post on the 17th July (2024!) and posted it on the 18th July, from the day following (19th) the TalkTalk internet service has been perfect. It once indicated that it was not working, but when I checked it out, it was and it has not dropped even a single time. I am so flabbergasted I cannot even begin to express it.

Typing straight into my blog program!
I wrote in my previous post that I preferred to blog straight into my blog program, but I could not do that last time as the internet kept dropping. Thankfully for this post I am back into typing straight in!

Just a coincidence?
I am asking myself whether this could be just a coincidence. But there have been a number of similar coincidences that have been happening over the last few months. And all these coincidences would happen after I post a ranty post online. If the internet was going to magically pick up by itself, it could have done so at any point in the week before I wrote my post. But no, it was literally the day after, after, that is, a prayer supporter might have had the chance to see the post and pray about it, possibly. I need to sit down and make a comprehensive list of everything. This particular incident though truly made my jaw drop. One of the reasons I have been so busy is because I have been making hay and investing in all my online ventures that I referred to in my previous post that the poor service at that time was keeping me from working on.

Hassle?
Because of all this, I have not bothered to change the internet to another provider.
You know, I was completely ready to go out and change it. The new provider was all researched, it was a matter of going out there and signing contracts etc. And yet, the truth is that it was still a bit of hassle.

Is there someone praying? Are they praying continuously, or was it just a once-off prayer?!
If you are out there, and you are praying for this on an ongoing basis, then please please please do not waste your time praying for this continuously, as much as I appreciate it. It is so straightforward for me to go and sign up with a new broadband provider that does not literally depend on a wing and a prayer I’d rather that you saved your prayer time to invest into bigger issues. If you are determined to pray for me, then thank you so much. I would always value prayers into my Christlikeness, holiness, humility, even my own prayer life.

If this is indeed a result of someone’s prayer, I don’t know how long it will last. I don’t know whether a single prayer has been enough to achieve these results. This is why I would like to encourage anyone who might be praying: please please please don’t continue praying about this. I’m perfectly sincere! Your time is so precious and there are more valuable prayers that you could be investing your time into.

Cost/benefit analysis (actually that is not the correct term here. I am looking for a term that is about whether something is worth the time spent on it.)
Here is the thing about my approach to prayer. I strongly believe in the power of prayer. However, it is also an investment of time. So I will evaluate how long something is likely to take, if prayed for, and I ask myself if there are any quicker solutions to the matter at hand. There have been times when I have been praying to find something, for instance, then stopped, because I thought that it would be quicker to just go to the shops and buy whatever it was.

So if something has a straightforward and easy solution that does not require prayer, then I will do that, and instead leave prayer for the things which need miraculous power, like praying for healing.
Because this broadband issue has a simple solution, it did not occur to me to pray about it. And the fact that the service transformed overnight from being laughably bad to being perfect is mindblowing to me.

So once again, if indeed there is a pray-er responsible for these things, I thank you once again. But once again I ask you not to carry on praying for this issue, not because I don’t value your prayers, I do, but rather because there are more worthwhile prayers to invest your time into.