Dragons in the Forest

The Fall and Rise of a Prayer

Dec 30, 2025

As a fresh year approaches, our thoughts turn towards renewal. If you have been considering revitalizing your practice of prayer in the new year, please enjoy this essay and the following collection of writings exploring the experience of communicating with God.

I’ve been wanting to pray again. To feel the sweetness of a connection with heaven. The twining thread that connects the earthly with the ethereal like a skinny shaft of light. I remember when I stopped. After the morning when I didn’t answer the phone. Christmas season. When God gave his only son for the saving of humanity. So that all mankind can be raised from the dead and live again. God’s hand in all things, that we might know him. And what does he know? He knew his son would die, he had time to prepare for it. Eons to prepare for it. The earthly death of a son. And what of Mary? Scriptures prophesied the death of a Messiah. How long did she have to prepare for it? Did Mary continue to pray after her son was killed?

My five children and I live at a small ski area. People come and go but never stay. What luck, then, for my son, that a family lived up the road with two boys his age. The Parkers. One boy a year older and one boy a year younger. The three became great friends.

—

One summer they decided to play dragons in the forest. They each set up a fort using my fairy garden items. Tiny potion bottles, miniature books and shovels. Little ceramic fairies with handmade swords. Fences to fortify their little properties. Imagination and dirt under their fingernails.

Ollie—one of the Parker boys—carried his items with so much caution. He didn’t want the fairies to break.

Sometimes after playing in the backyard, the boys would swim in the pool. One of the boys cried once; they didn’t have goggles.

“Here,” said Ollie, “you can have mine.”

—

People believe their prayers are answered all the time.

Cancer and sickness

job loss

military deployment

money

car accidents

A family who prays together, stays together.

Jesus prayed. In the garden. He prayed for all of us. He showed us the way. Set the example.

—

That morning, when I didn’t answer the phone, I turned over, put a pillow over my head—determined to sleep. I stayed betwixt the luminal feathers, phone across the room. I didn’t even look.

—

I’d always prayed at my bed as a child. I grew up with what I thought was a strong testimony of God, the scriptures, Jesus, and prophets. When I went through hard times I prayed for peace, for help, for forgiveness. As a little girl, my yellow hair would fall around my face and my nose would touch the handmade purple quilt with yarn-tied squares. I heard the spirit as a kid.

—

You know something bad has happened when you hear the helicopters. But I didn’t hear the helicopter that morning.

When I finally got out of my lazy bed, the phone rang again. I answered this time and got the Relief Society president.

There’s been an accident at the Parkers’.

I looked out the frosted window and my heart seized. The walls of snow took my breath away.

The ambulance can’t get up the canyon

Who is it?

—

Agency is a beautiful gift from God. This is what I’ve always been taught. We have free will to make our choices. God allows us to make bad ones, and then we deal with the consequences.

So, what is prayer for? Do we only pray to thank God for things we’re blessed with? How can it possibly matter what we ask for if all the choices of others around us are constantly affecting us?

When my childhood best friend had leukemia and we all prayed for it to go away, he was healed. Why did my other friend die from brain cancer? Fasting, prayer, hopes, pleadings. But he died anyway. How can we pray for things when life itself seems to pick and choose who it wants to save?

—

I saw the local fire truck in front of the Parkers’ house. We raced out of our car, starting towards the front door. But time stood still as I locked eyes with Ollie’s mother. The entirety of my theology, my mysticism, was carried in that look, and I knew it was too late. I am still haunted by her eyes.

It was a tractor accident. Ollie and his dad, trying to do some chores. A choice to teach his son about hard work. And then the accident.

A helicopter landed in the snow, but now it was too late. The ambulance was far down the canyon, trapped by the snow, it was too late. The phone had rung but I didn’t answer it. I was too late.

—

That’s when I stopped praying. But not at first. No, at first, I prayed fervently.

Please bless the Parker family

Please help Ollie’s young friends and cousins

Please help his mother to know she is loved

Please help them to pick out the small coffin, the little white clothing

Please bless them to make it through the viewing

Please God, help me to know how to help them

Please help me to tell my son

Please, God, forgive me

I knelt near my son, the action itself pantomiming prayer. I squeezed his ankle. I told him his friend was gone. Seven years old. He looked at me with big dry hazel eyes and said, “He’s with Jesus, mommy.” Perfect faith. Faith without question. He didn’t wonder why God hadn’t saved his friend, why prayers hadn’t worked, why the free agency of a father trying to do good for his sons had ended in this. He didn’t demand the why.

Not like me.

The gifts of prayer and free agency seem to crash against each other like the waves of a violent sea. An unknown darkness beneath the compulsory white froth.

—

Two years earlier, leaving two young boys at home, I had made what I thought would be a quick trip down the canyon. So many police cars on the highway leading up to our home in the woods. What are they doing?

They never expected what was about to happen.

Who can ever expect what’s about to happen? Past our next inhale of breath into the silence. The point is that we don’t know. That’s why we pray and have blind faith that trusting in God and his mercy will protect us and our loved ones. Through the mystery, the ambiguity of life.

My son, sitting at home getting bored of TV, somehow thrilled his imagination to an idea. An adventurous and confident child, he would go outside, by himself, in the dark heavy snowstorm and jump out of a tree. Soft snow would make a great landing.

—

Does God supervise his children? Does he really know what we are doing at all times? We are told he knows when one small bird falls. We learn in Matthew that God numbers the sparrows, and knows when one falls to the ground.

Ollie fell to the ground.

Why hadn’t God done something?

—

My son pulled his orange snowpants over his t-shirt along with his too-large, hand-me-down Target snow boots and trudged out into the storm, our two dogs trailing after. He found a tree and climbed up as far as he could go. And then he used his free will to make a choice.

He jumped

Into the dark

Into the sea of snow below him

Into the valley behind our house which all the slides fed into

It was a soft landing indeed, deceptively reassuring. Then he kept going. Carried downward with a hillside of flurry, his arms pinned. Passing through a narrowing tunnel until he pressed up against the bottom of the avalanched snow. He was stuck. Trapped. Held fixed in a silent hollow of the forest. All alone—the snow falling deadly, yet gently. Coming down fast, softly topping his head, drifting into his eyes and his nose as he struggled and then became still with frustration. Screaming. Crying for help in a hushed dark space. A mortal space.

—

“Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows.”

—

Somewhere in my son’s desperate moments, I was coming home. And at that very same moment a cataclysmic avalanche, burning and stinging, like a deluge of hell, came crashing down the canyon and covered the highway that led from the city up to our mountain home. Snow, trees, and hundred-pound rocks. I was completely stranded. And my two little boys all alone, one asleep on the floor next to the TV, and one submerged in his own avalanche.

Listening to the news I found a hotel and called the boys.

The home phone rang

and rang

and rang!

No. Answer.

—

“Be strong and of a good courage, fear not, nor be afraid . . . for the Lord thy God, he it is that doth go with thee; he will not fail thee, nor forsake thee.” (Deuteronomy 31:6)

—

My boy was stuck down in a snowy hole in subzero temperatures. Had he been trapped all night outside in his avalanche, he would have died. He had used his agency to make a choice and now was going to suffer the consequences. But would God help? Would years of prayer step in?

The dogs were out.

Siberian husky curiosity: What was her boy doing down there for so long?

She stood over the tunnel and looked with her clear bright blue eyes. She watched.

Brave and desperate words penetrated the crisp air, “I’m stuck. Get me out girl! Can you dig me out?”

Our husky dug dug and scraped and clawed and eventually freed an arm. Then they dug together, a dog and her boy, in the quiet, cold, snowstorm, in the stillness of night. They dug in the snow until he finally popped out. He was stuck so tightly—he pulled out of his boots. Then he hiked towards the back door of the house, in the dark, in bare feet, wading through the ten feet of freshly fallen snow.

I didn’t make it back home until noon the next day. He should have died. My son’s life should have ended. But it didn’t.

—

Two little boys, fallen into the snow.

Two ringing phones, ignored.

Two different outcomes.

Why was there nobody to pull Ollie out in time?

There’s no guarantee God will step in, mitigate the consequences of our choices—have our back. Some prayers aren’t answered. At least not in the way we would like. Why wouldn’t God reward the good choice and punish the bad?

It must be hard on God’s heart—giving free agency as a gift. Watching his children make mistakes and then pay the consequences. And harder still? Watching someone’s good choices end unintentionally in destruction or death.

I watch my son grow out of his jeans, get haircuts, discover new joys, learn new lessons, and I cover my mouth in horror for Ollie’s mom. I look and I see God step in for the prayers of some but not others. What is the code? Where is the key? I’ve searched the scriptures. All I can take from the unfairness of life is that God’s son will ultimately make it all right. That he will heal the broken hearts, dry the tears from our eyes, and make it all—somehow—fair. For everyone, no matter what.

My prayers, now unspoken, delay in my heart. Beating with fear and hope and disdain all together. I went to my knees once, in my closet. I folded my arms and bowed my head with reverence, with intention. Then I cried. Because I didn’t know if it mattered what I said. I cannot define my prayers as making a difference in anything. And so, I stopped.

But I haven’t stopped listening. A part of me still yearns for that connection with heaven—for that shaft of light. I don’t know if my words will ever matter the way I once believed. Yet, I sometimes feel my burdens rise up through my unspoken prayers. And my fears are laced with a quiet hope—an optimism rising like warm breath. And I wonder if that is enough for now.

Editor’s note: all names have been changed to protect the anonymity of those involved

Sarah Arrowsmith Warnick is a creative nonfiction writer with passion for storytelling that captures the depth and complexity of everyday life. A student of Brigham Young University, she lives in the scenic mountains of Sundance, with her husband and five children.

Art by Harald Sohlberg.