Broadcaster Phillip Adams, in the Weekend Australian, once referred to the perceived failure of God to answer the prayers of desperate people as ‘this endless breach of contract, this failure to honour the guarantee.’ I think the failure is in Phillip’s inability to understand what faith is. Mature faith accepts that there is much in life we don’t understood while still believing in a supreme intelligence that stands behind it, rather than an infinite series of chance events. Faith enables us to accept and respond with courage. Solzhenitsyn got it right in his novel A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, set in a brutal Soviet prison camp, a fellow prisoner ridicules Ivan saying, “Prayers won’t help you get out of here any faster.” To which Ivan replies, ‘I do not pray to get out of prison, I pray to do the will of God.’