Let me answer with a story I heard. Once upon a time long long ago, a young man who just found religion saw a old and devoted saintly sage deep in meditation.
As he watched, a depressed and tear eyed man came to that sage and said “I am unable to deal with all my sins, please take them away and grace me with mental peace”. The sage said “Sure, pour some water from your palm into my hands and repeat ‘all my sins are now yours to bear’ three times”. The man quickly did as instructed, and then the sage told him that all his sins are now gone from him, so he is free to go and live life without worrying about them. The man became very happy, thanked the sage profusely and left.
The young man who was watching all this became very intrigued. He approached that sage and asked him as to whether all sins of that man really were washed away from him and they simply transferred to the sage, and the sage said yes. When requested by the young man how that is possible, the sage said sins are like fires, that will burn you one day if you don’t put out quickly.
He pointed the young man to look behind the sage, and the young man to his confounding saw an ocean of water suddenly appear out of nowhere behind the sage.
The sage said I have no fires stalking me, because I have nothing but an ocean of devotional practices and penance following me, so all the fires of sin I took from that man were quickly put out by the ocean of good karma I have following me. Pleasantly surprised young man then revealed his own troubles and told the sage that he also picked up religion very recently and is now a devotee of the lord and now does daily japa or meditation etc. and yet he experiences bad things only, why is it so? Why isn’t his ocean of devotional penance and practices not burning his fires of sins away like that?
The sage then pointed young man to look behind him. When the young man looked back all he could see were acres and acres of small fires continuously burning behind him!
The sage said, the devotional practices/penances you are accumulating now is but a palm of water, not nearly enough to put out all the fires of sin you accumulated in all your past and current lifetimes. You have a long way to go before they become sizeable enough to put out your past fires, help you to prevent future fires ahead of you. If you don’t keep up with your devotional practices, then your fires will continue to increase behind you and keep slowly burning you, so do keep at it.
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What that story is trying to say is that those ‘bad’ things would have happened regardless of whether you prayed to Ganesha (or any other divinity) or not. Since you seem to be thinking of cause & effects, karma siddhAnta perhaps may provide an easily relateable and understandable answer to your question. Proponents of karam siddhAnta often provide this example about why we do not see the benefit of our new found devotional practices or why they seem to backfire— Think of all your past karma from all the lifetimes your soul had previously lived in, as a bank account.
As you know, money deposited into your account increases your bank balance and withdrawals/expenses from your account reduce your account balance. If you withdrew/spent more than you earned consistently, then one day your bank balance will be negative, i.e. you now owe to the bank and cannot withdraw/spend anymore since your balance is consistently negative. So now all your earnings/income are now forced to reduce your negative bank balance instead of allowing you to withdraw/spend such earnings!
So is it with your karma. If you are born with a significantly more accumulated bad karma than good karma in this lifetime, then all good karma you will do in this lifetime is actually going to go to only reduce such negative balance aka reducing the accumulated bad karma you have in your account, instead of allowing you to benefit from it (by preventing any impending bad events in your life)!
Source: https://vedicsiddhanta.in/2017/07/the-karma-theory-part-3-understanding.html
Knowing this, the answer to your quest should be clear to you now. Use your free will to keep up with the devotion to Ganesha and one day when the ocean of devotion will become sizable in your heavenly karma account, you will start to notice a change. Don’t doubt or stop, just keep up with the devotion! - Jay Brahm
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