Today marks the beginning of our sixth year at Hendred. Lots of plans, lots of hopes, lots of dreams, all of them subject to the will of God — easy to say, but not always easy to accept if God has his own ideas about how things should go! For some people, the fact that God does not always respond to prayer in the way we expect or want leads to some very illogical conclusions: God does not love me; God does not exist; and so on. Can we turn things round and say, isn't it amazing that God does sometimes (often even) respond to prayer exactly as we hope or in ways that exceed all our expectations? Perhaps our ideas about God are a little askew. We want freedom for ourselves but are reluctant to allow it to God.