If you’re like me, you’re glad to have the prayers of anyone and everyone. And yet, when we have an urgent need, the kind we want kept in confidence, and for which we need immediate emergency prayer, the people we first think of calling are extremely few in number.

We were facing a family crisis, but the kind you don’t want to write about on your blog or announce in facebook or proclaim from the pulpit. It was more the type every family deals with sooner or later and wishes would go away.

We needed to pray and we needed prayer.

Margaret thought of one person to call and I thought of one. We made those two phone calls and enlisted those special friends to intercede for the situation. We have every confidence in them and in their prayers.

Do I think God hears one person’s prayers above all others? Do I think some people pray better than other people? Would a loving Father choose to answer one child’s requests and ignore the pleas from another?

I have no answer to these questions.

God is sovereign and can answer any request He pleases (Psalm 115:3). If there is a pattern to the way He grants one request and denies another, I haven’t found it yet.

It’s tempting to say it’s all a matter of faith, but we know better than that. People of great faith go through times when Heaven seems far off, when their prayers seem to rise no higher than the ceiling, when God seems deaf or preoccupied, the same as everyone else.

Even so, you and I have a few people whom we think of calling for prayer before everyone else.

Here are the four qualities of the person I call for prayer first.

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Some guy in Alabama ticked me off the other day.

I was driving back to New Orleans from two weeks of ministry in Tennessee and Kentucky when I bought a Birmingham (AL) News in Tuscaloosa. At a rest stop in Mississippi, I scanned it and was snagged by a letter to the editor written by an outspoken agnostic.

After reading it and steaming a little, I tossed the paper in the trash. Later, wished I’d kept it just for reference here. So I’m going by memory.

The writer wanted the world to know that the recent tornadoes in Alabama proves beyond doubt either that there is no God or if there is, He is a tyrant who delights in doing cruel things.

He was clearly proud of his great letter. Betcha he clipped it and is displaying it somewhere prominent in his house.

I’m wondering now if anyone responded to the editor and answered the letter. Probably not. The Bible cautions against answering fools, and this guy surely fits in that category.

Now, I am not saying all atheists or all agnostics are shallow, non-thinking, or even fools. When Scripture says the fool hath said in his heart, ‘There is no God’ (Psalm 14:1), it’s not saying everyone who says that is a fool. Only that fools do this. There is a difference.

Many an agnostic or atheist is an honest seeker, and if he/she perseveres will emerge into the light. They are not fools.

But this guy was. I feel safe in saying that.

Think of it. This fellow’s reasoning process goes like this: If there were a good God, He would only do those things that please us. Since there is much in this world that displeases us, there must not be a loving God.

(Hey, I took a course in logic in college. I don’t claim to remember everything about it, but I do know the syllogism.)

Imagine someone looking you in the eye and saying this: “There cannot possibly be a loving God because there are things that take place in the world we don’t like.”

That’s what that bird is saying.

But he’s not alone. He has his friends–birds of the same feather–in churches all across the land, and ensconced in seats of criticism where they sound forth on their ridiculous philosophy.

Remember the J. B. Phillips book from a generation ago? Your God is Too Small answered this foolishness back then. Trouble is, it keeps popping up with each new crop of critics, people too lazy to think matters through, people who want their theology to be easy and go down smooth, otherwise they reject all notions of God.

So, what is the correct answer? Why the tornadoes across the Deep South two weeks ago? Why the flooding in the Mississippi River Valley right now? Why do good people go through suffering while Heaven seems deaf to their pleas?

No one has all the answers. Here are some.

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The best-selling religious books today are about heaven.

Write one about how you died for a few minutes and experienced a momentary jolt of nirvana beyond anything you ever imagined and publishers will line up outside your door ready to print it. They know the book-buying public is eager to get a glimpse through that scary curtain called death…so long as what’s on the other side meets with their preconceptions.

Ross Douthat is a columnist for the New York Times. In a recent column titled “Hell’s grip on religious imagination weakens,” he writes, Even in our supposedly disenchanted age, large majorities of Americans believe in God and heaven, miracles and prayer. But belief in hell lags well behind, and the fear of damnation seems to have evaporated.

He says near-death stores are quick to sell. “The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven” tells of a child’s return from paradise. However, “you’ll search in vain for ‘The Investment Banker Who Came Back From Hell.”

Douthat blames this disenchantment, this unbelief, regarding hell on “growing pluralism,” among other things.

What does that mean? Simply that people of all religion live on our block, go to our schools, shop in our stores, and are no longer abstractions to us. So, when we consider the question whether those-who-do-not-believe-in-Jesus go to hell, we are asking about some very real people we know personally and not the impersonal heathen of some dark continent.

I’m grateful for Rob Bell raising the question of hell for our generation. It’s an issue Bible-believers need to come to grips with, even though there is precious little about the subject that makes it fun to study or debate. No one wants there to be a hell.

Well, no one did until this week.

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