Category Archives: Prayer

A Roundabout Route

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This week when our prayer group of 5 ladies met to pray, Abigail began our time with an effective visual. She opened her iPad and showed us a picture (via Google Map Maker) of the route she would soon be driving between two Colorado destinations: Aspen and Crested Butte.

MapAlthough Abigail assured us the distance between the two towns was less than 10 miles (just long enough to make a nice hike), the quickest way to drive there was to travel in a roundabout way on mountain roads for more than 200 miles to the tune of 5 hours.

“Isn’t this the perfect picture of prayer?” she said, putting her finger on point A. “Here’s the request, and immediately God starts down the road to his answer, which is over here,” she said, pointing to B. If we were God, we’d rush the answer across the quick 10 mile route rather than taking the convoluted circuitous way. So why doesn’t he do that?

So often we pray as if we’re a waitress writing down the ask for a short-order cook, but God sees the process differently. On Tuesday mornings we have over 200 requests to pray over in 2 hours. This means we have to move quickly, which is why we’ve grouped the needs according to topic/subject. (God’s Wish List)

The only reason such a volume of needs doesn’t overwhelm us is our belief that God himself is in the room with us. All we have to do is enter his presence and lay out the requests. Then, much to our delight (and relief), he takes over from there.

But that’s the thing. He doesn’t take someone with problem A and put him/her on a rapid transit line to connect speedily with solution B. He could say, “Let’s see…. I’ll find the right surgeon for that one, put this other couple in front of a good marriage counselor, and arrange the perfect job interview for that other one. Check. Check. Check.”

But that just isn’t him. He’d rather take his time… and ours. That’s because he’s not only concerned about those being prayed for but also the ones doing the praying. All have needs, and when God maps out his choice of a route from request to answer, he’s intending to work wonders all along the way.

DetourGoogle Maps has an interesting caveat at the bottom of its directions page: “You may find that construction projects, traffic, weather, or other events may cause conditions to differ from the map results, and you should plan your route accordingly. You must obey all signs or notices regarding your route.”

What a great summary of how God works, dotting the route from request to answer with unexpected delays. The longer the delays, though, the grander the answers. And maybe that’s the reason we ladies continue to travel the route to our Tuesday morning prayer meetings…. so we don’t miss a single one of those grand answers!

“Pray without ceasing.” (1 Thessalonians 5:17)

When Nothing Fits Together

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Festive lightsThis morning in southwest Michigan, we awoke to an ongoing snowstorm and 8 inches of snow. Before the sun was up, my next door neighbors had turned on festive mini-lights above their deck, and the combination of snow and leaves falling together around them was magical. In my 68 years, I don’t ever remember such heavy snow coming so early in November.

As I cautiously made my way to our Tuesday prayer group, I couldn’t resist stopping repeatedly to take pictures of colorful leaves weighed down with snow, an impressive oxymoron. Was it a wintery-fall or a fallish-winter?

It isn’t unusual to encounter life-circumstances that don’t go together, a plus and a minus that are completely incompatible. This is especially true when we’ve asked God to be involved, and no matter how we try, we can never predict what he’s going to do.

MoneyLet’s say a poor man asks the Lord to strengthen his dependency on him, and then God answers by giving him great wealth. The man wasn’t asking for riches and is surprised (and delighted), but if ever there is a big-league test for personal dependency on God, that’s it.

 

Or maybe a wife prays for the Lord to influence her workaholic husband not to spend so much time at the office, and God answers by putting him in a hospital bed where he has plenty of time to think about his priorities.

Or a mother agonizes over her child’s drinking and asks God to take him off that slippery slope, but God allows him to drift into alcoholism. Years later, he finds Jesus Christ through Alcoholics Anonymous, and his life is revolutionized.

It’s important to ask ourselves if we can accept God’s interesting (and sometimes agonizing) answers to our requests. So often we rail against him for allowing things to get worse. And then, months (or years) down the road, he opens our understanding to the magnitude of change he had in mind. We learn his purposes for a life are always greater in scope than anything we prayed for.

But even more significant than accepting the incongruous connections between our prayers and God’s answers is the underlying principle that we must never pray with a mindset of telling God what to do. We can’t “put in an order” and expect him to follow our instructions.

Instead, after we’ve poured out our requests, if oxymoronic things start happening we should excitedly realize, “It’s God!” After all, the biggest oxymoron of all time was when he saved the whole world by crushing his only Son.

So, after we’ve prayed and nothing seems to fit together right, we should stop to recognize God and marvel at his work. In a small way it’s like stopping to take pictures of brightly colored leaves bowed low under the weight of an untimely snow.

Wintry Fall

“While Jesus was here on earth… God heard his prayers because of his deep reverence for God.” (Hebrews 5:7)

The Real Reason

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My last 24 hours have been spent in the company of 6 women with whom I’ve been friends for more than half my life. Though the 7 of us are quite different (ages, interests, abilities, passions), God brought us together for a multitude of reasons:

  • As a support system through trouble
  • To challenge one another spiritually
  • For good, old-fashioned fun
  • To learn from each others’ wisdom

RadioThis morning in our radio-church time together, the Scripture centered on a verse in 2 Corinthians that speaks to the frustrations of physical decline, something we 60-plus “girls” are well aware of (v. 4:16). But that downward spiral was countered with an uplifting truth: inwardly we can be renewed day-by-day through our relationship with the Lord. In other words, we don’t need external improvement to experience internal enrichment.

Today God gave me a burst of internal enrichment through one of these friends.*  “Beth” and her husband “Ron” are part of a program called Safe Families, giving temporary safe shelter to a child whose family is in crisis. The hope is that with a little short-term help, the parents can become a safe family themselves.

Safe FamiliesBeth and Ron never know when they’ll get a call to pick up a child in need. They don’t know if it’ll be a boy, a girl, a baby, a pre- schooler, or an older child. They can’t predict if he/she will be difficult or compliant, but they aren’t particular about those details. They love them all.

Safe families welcome children for as little as 2 days or as long as a year. As our group listened to Beth’s stories, someone said, “How difficult it must be to be separated from your parents, then separated again from your safe family.”

“I know,” Beth said. “But even if we have a child for just a short time, once we’ve met them, they go on our permanent prayer list.”

Bonk.

Bonk(That’s the sound of God hitting me over the head with something new.)

It’s possible that the steady, scriptural, far-reaching prayer poured into the lives of these particular children is the real reason God moves them in and out of Beth and Ron’s home, more important than the 2 weeks or 2 months of care they give them.

For example, little “Sammy” who’s with them now for just a short time, will be prayed over for 2 decades or more, as long as Beth and Ron live. They fully believe God can do what people cannot, and on that basis, when they say goodbye to their young charges, they have high hopes for their futures.

That exchange — 2 weeks in their home for 20 years of prayer — is one that will benefit the children in astounding ways, through their rest of their lives.

“The Lord will keep you from all harm— he will watch over your life; the Lord will watch over your coming and going [for example, in and out of Beth and Ron’s home], both now and forevermore.” (Psalm 121:7-8)

* [This dear friend has asked that I not use her real name.]