I used to imagine God as the Great Problem Solver, the one who would fix everything if I just prayed hard enough, used the right prayers, and prayed in precisely the right way. God was powerful, I thought, but also distant. And if the Great Problem Solver couldn’t fix things, which seemed to occur more frequently than I would have liked, I turned to Saint Jude. I figured that if it was beyond the capacity of God to do something, then surely it must be a hopeless cause, and it was time to call on Saint Jude.
