He's right. I really thought about it and I have come to this conclusion: He does listen.
In your darkest hour, when your heart hurts and your soul cries out, He hears you. When you are on your knees, sobbing, begging to be released from the pain you are in, He hears you. When things look so bleak that you think you will never make it out to the other side, He hears you. When you are huddled into a corner, praying that you could just have the strength to leave your own house, He hears you. When you feel like your life is falling down around you in tiny little pieces, He hears you. When you scream out in frustration and rage and anger, He hears you. When life seems like it is literally too much to bear, and you are Atlas with the weight of the world sitting on your small shoulders, He hears you.
I have also come to this conclusion: God will not wave a magic wand and make everything better for you. It just doesn't work that way. Lord knows, I wish it did. However, if it DID work that way, then we would learn nothing and go around making the same mistakes, over and over again. That doesn't make much sense, now does it? It's almost like parenting. Parents, when your child falls down while learning to walk, do you go over every single time and pick them back up? As much as it hurts your heart to make them learn to stand on their own two feet, even though you know it could hurt them or bruise them, you know you have to. Otherwise, they will learn nothing. They will fall down, again and again, and look to you to solve their problem.
Life is not that way. When you make mistakes and fall down, you have to learn to acknowledge why you have fallen down and learn to stand up again, knowing that you will not make that same mistake again. And God sees this. I think He places things in your path so that you will LEARN. He doesn't expect you to be perfect. He knows you're human and you're fallible. He knows you will fall down and you will mess up. But He also knows, like any good parent, that you will be able to get back up, even if you have to ask for His help to do so. And when you do, He will be there, cheering you on. I honestly cannot believe in a God who sits there in constant, angry judgment of us. I believe that all God wants is for us to believe in Him, understand our mistakes, truly seek forgiveness, and try our best to live good lives. He knows that we will sometimes fail in this and He understands. He didn't create us to be drones or robots. He gave us free will for a reason.
I am by no means an expert on God. This is simply what I've come to understand and believe in the course of my life. I'm still learning and I am still falling down and failing miserably sometimes. The Lord knows I've made my fair share of mistakes in my life, some worse than others. They have forced me to take a long, hard look in the mirror and to understand that sometimes, I will not like what I see. And that sometimes, life will be extremely hard. It's what you do with what you have learned that really makes the difference. Should you simply shrug off your mistakes and say "Meh, I'll deal with it later" or "Meh, what does it matter?", then you will have learned nothing and you will never grow as a person. Should you lay your faults at another person's doorstep, then you will only be doing yourself a disservice. If you look at your mistakes and really SEE them, and FEEL them, and humble yourself before them, then that is where change happens. Because unless you truly and deeply understand where you went astray, then nothing will ever change and you will continue on a path that is self-destructive and harmful.
So, that being said, from this point forward, I have made the conscious decision to live my life in a much better way. A way in which, when I look in the mirror each day, I can be happy with what I see. I'll leave you with a line from one of my favorite movies, which pretty much sums this up:
"I think it can be best said...'The road to Hell is paved with good intentions."
"Well, what about the road back? What's that paved with?"
"Humility....:"
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