Thank you for your wise insights and kindness, Alec. I really appreciate it.

It's really this point you bring up in your last paragraph - of people saying "I'll pray for you" and then doing nothing practical help - that has most bothered me over the last year and a half with the PTSD. That has just happened so much, so often, and been so discouraging.

And as I mentioned a bit in the podcast - I think my negative experience in Evangelical/Fundamentalist Protestant Christianity has "traumatized" me a bit. Not to the same extent as what happened to me with the violence of the police, but it's similar. Just as I'm more cynical and a little fearful about police in general now, I have similar sort of disappointed feelings when it comes to more fundamentalist Christian attitudes toward prayer. I've just so often heard the justification, "I'm doing this because I prayed about it and it's what God wants me to do" that I'm a bit cynical about it. "No, that's what YOU want to do, or what a demonic spirit posing as God told you to do. Don't avoid responsibility for your decisions by trying to claim God told you to do it."