It works 1) because there is no fiction, so whenever anyone creates a story he's really reporting something that happened in another universe and 2) no one ever actually gets the multiverse right who is not in the multiverse, the M. Joseph Young didn't get it right but told true stories displaced to a different world. It's a bit like Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth. It is true in some universe, but it doesn't happen to be true in ours. He wrote it as if it were true in our universe, so he had the true story displaced to the wrong world. The same thing could be said of Star Wars--there's no "Force" in our universe, so this didn't happen "a long long time ago in a galaxy far far away" except that it did, in another universe in which there is such a thing as "The Force".
So Lauren's stories sound just like stories you've read, although she probably gives different details here and there--things that were not in the books are included in her telling, and things that are in the books she may have forgotten or not mentioned.
"John, I think maybe that praying not to botch is a bit like asking God to keep us from sinning. Or maybe it's more like asking God to give us superpowers. I don't know. But suppose you're on the top of a skyscraper and you're running from some monster you know is going to rip you to shreds if it catches you, and you run out of space. You decide that your best hope is to leap from this building to the one across the street. That might be thirty or forty or even fifty yards. But you pray, 'God, let me make this jump,' and you leap from the edge of the building. So what happens?
"Maybe God answers your prayer, exactly like you asked, and you sail through the air and tumble onto the rooftop across the way. Maybe the monster chasing you decides he is not going to follow, not going to take the risk, and you get away. That's what you wanted, right? Maybe God does that. But maybe he answers your prayer exactly like you asked, but you don't get exactly what you wanted--maybe the monster leaps across the gap, too, and is still right behind you. Or maybe you land on that other building, but the fall is too far and you land wrong and are injured or even killed by the impact. Do we blame God because He didn't do what we meant, but what we said? Then again, maybe we don't make the jump--maybe we realize half a second after we leave the edge of the building that we're not going to get across. Maybe we start praying for God to do something else--send his angels to catch us, perhaps. Maybe He does. Maybe He had a reason for not letting us make that jump--like maybe He knew that the monster would be right behind us when we landed, but would not dare leap down from that height. Or maybe we fall and hit the ground and die. Or maybe we never make the jump, as the monster grabs us before we leave the edge, and tears us to bits. But what then? Can we complain that God did not do what we told Him to do?
"I had a conversation once with Merlin. We were working on setting up the sword in the stone--is that a story you know? Anyway, my argument was that we were setting up something that said God chose Arthur to be King of England, when it was really we who chose him. Merlin made a lot of sense, then. He pointed out that I often told God what I wanted Him to do, and God did it. A great deal of my magic, my prayers, my claiming scripture as true for me immediately, was telling God what I thought He should do--and the number of times He did what I told Him was frightful. But that's because on some level I have become a friend of God, and He looks for my advice. He gives me assignments, jobs to do, people to help, and so when I am trying to do those jobs and I say to Him that for me to do the job I need Him to do thus and such, He comes through, most of the time. What happens the rest of the time? Maybe in some of those cases, God has decided not to take my advice, but to do something entirely different. Maybe He knows something I do not know, and whatever it is I wanted to do, that's not going to work.
"Besides, I don't know that God always wins every skirmish. I know that I still sin; God has not completely conquered that in me. I know that God is not willing that any should perish--and yet people do, so He doesn't always get His way. And remember, in Daniel, the prophet prayed and it took something like two or three weeks before an angel arrived to give him the answer. Remember what the angel said? He said that someone else, someone he called the Prince of Persia, had fought against him and kept him from coming. So maybe when you prayed for that healing, some enemy of God thought it would be better that it not happen, and managed to set off an explosion to remove you before God could grant your prayer.
"And maybe if I hit the pavement, it's because God had already decided that I was no longer needed in that city, and it was time for me to move somewhere else. You were killed in an explosion, and yet you live. For us, death is nothing more than God's way of moving us to the next world. That's true for all these people as well--it's just that for us, we are going to see a few more worlds than they are.
"Anyway, if you pray that you will not botch, isn't that just like praying for something to work in the first place? If God isn't going to let it work, then expecting that He's going to keep it from going bad isn't any different fundamentally from expecting that he's going to make it work right on the first try. Sometimes God doesn't do that. He wants us to use our heads, our brains, to think of alternatives. I've learned that it's easy to become arrogant and even self-centered when everything you can do starts to become easy. You stop thinking of others as people deserving respect. God has allowed you to exercise powers most people would say are impossible. The very fact that you have these gifts is already a miracle. That you have received a miracle makes you responsible to use it wisely for the benefit of others. The feeling that we cannot fail is a bad feeling. It makes us cocky and complacent, and we lose perspective then."
"I've never had a skill that 'always works'. Best I've done, I think, is a few of my light spells--but I've mostly used them against vampires, and sometimes the vampires have used darkness spells to quash them, so I guess they don't always work either."
--M. J. Young