Overpowered (conclusion)

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My morning prayer time yesterday became overwhelmed with the many severe problems on my post-it notes, each in need of prayer. Can a person become too discouraged to pray? Isn’t that the moment we ought to double-time-it toward God with our needs?

Blubbering all over my notes, I finally set everything aside, closed my mascara-smudged eyes and said, “Father, help me here. What am I supposed to do? What should I be thinking about all this?”

Immediately, from out of nowhere, he plopped an old photo into my mind like a slide into a projector, a 65 year old black and white picture Mom had taken. It’s one of my favorites from childhood and shows a 3-year-old-me sitting on the beach, upset about something. My daddy is leaning over my shoulder trying to do several things:

  • hear my words
  • understand my problem
  • show sympathy
  • help me cope

My head is tipped toward his, pressing cheek-to-cheek as if to say, “I’m not going to let you fix this too soon, because I’m really loving being close to you.”

As I sat in my chair, eyes closed, I thought about that picture. What was its connection to my feeling swamped by the heaviness of so many prayer needs? As I sat quietly, God answered that question.

“Margaret, the reason you like this picture is because it shows the power and security of a father’s love. After your daddy came close to you, you became sure everything would end well.

“I’m also your Father. I’m near to you in that same way. I love you as he did, and I care about your problem and those of the people on your notes. You need to have the same confidence in me that you had in him. Since you’re talking to me now instead of him, I’m here to tell you everything is going to end well.”

I was stunned by the simplicity of God’s solution to my predicament. I’d made it far more complicated than it needed to be, so he gently brought me back to the basics:

He can.

I can’t.

The minute any of us puts a toe over the line of “I can fix this myself,” stress soars and tears flow. When we trust God to do the fixing, stress lowers and faith soars.

My task in yesterday’s prayer time, then, was to lift my post-it-people to God, not with a heavy heart but with strong trust in him for whatever comes next in each of those lives. I’m to be confident he has heard, has understood, will sympathize, and will help… just like my daddy.

It didn’t occur to me until I wrote this blog that the first letters of those 4 things God did for me (and my daddy, too) spell HUSH. God had to hush me up so I could listen, before I could understand the right way to talk to him.

“When you ask him, be sure that your faith is in God alone. Do not waver.” (James 1:6)

Overpowered

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With all the strife and struggle in our headlines these days, we can listen to news reports and quickly feel overwhelmed. None of us can fix all that’s wrong, and there’s frustration in realizing that.

This morning I felt the same crushing helplessness during my prayer time.

Sitting down with God in the corner of my bedroom each day, I put several things on my lap: a clipboard filled with blank paper, an array of scribbled post-it notes in all colors and sizes (prayer requests), a pen, pages of Scripture verses grouped by topic, and my daily devotional book by Charles Spurgeon. A cup of coffee is within reach, and maybe a rice cake with peanut butter on it, at least briefly.

As I start praying, it always impacts me that God is willing to listen and, more astoundingly, to answer prayers. But something else is always present, too. It’s a determination to “do business with God” over my own sin. He never fails to let me know what needs purging and deals with me accordingly. Sometimes the whole hour is spent on that. But most mornings there’s time to sort through the post-its and pray a wide variety of requests over the names and needs on them.

This morning was that kind of prayer time, and I looked forward to claiming biblical promises over the various needs, and listening for God’s directions on how to pray. But something unexpected happened right after I got started.

Reading the serious nature of the requests on the notes, one after another, began to swamp me. Each tiny piece of paper held weighty problems seemingly much too heavy for it, and as I handled the notes, their burdens jumped off the papers and onto me. Trying to prioritize them, my mind swirled like it was in a hurricane of sorrow. Just like with the turbulence in our headlines, I knew I couldn’t fix anything on those notes.

I started to cry, wishing I hadn’t put my mascara on before sitting down to pray. Using the paper napkin that had been under my rice cake, I began dabbing at tears until it was soaked, and then just let the other tears fall. What was happening? I’d prayed for many of these same people in their same dilemmas on multiple occasions in the past without “losing it.”

What had happened to my confidence in God’s ability to do what I couldn’t? Was I doubting he could affect change in the lives of the people I was praying for? Had I forgotten that it was God’s job to “fix” things, not mine?

But God was, as always, up to something completely different than what I thought. And he used a 65 year old photo to let me know what it was.

(Concluded tomorrow)

“God does great things beyond searching out. Who will say to him, ‘What are you doing?’ ” (Job 9:10,12)

I don’t know.

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When I was a young mother, I wanted with all my heart to give good answers to the questions my 7 children asked, especially their questions about God.

When they asked and I didn’t know the answer, I responded with what I thought was an answer. And if I couldn’t come up with that, I just made it up, but of course it was done with sterling intentions. Every answer was given with a desire to make God so appealing, they couldn’t help but love him.

The problem was, I wasn’t always feeding them info that had come from the Bible. An even greater travesty, though, was that by answering all their questions definitively, I was giving them the impression God could be fully understood. Despite him telling us we can’t know everything about him, I was acting as though I was the one exception to that, and had him all figured out.

Even writing that sentence makes me tremble.

Although God is never at a loss for answers, we need to admit that we can be. Take these tough questions, for example, from children:

  1. Will I have my same name in heaven?
  2. How can hell be dark if there is fire there?
  3. Why do people get mad if Jesus is in their hearts?
  4. Were there dinosaurs on the ark?
  5. Why does God love people?

When I was asked these kinds of things, I’d launch off with a babbling non-answer that left the kids confused and me, too. The best (and most honest) response would have been, “Honey, I wish I could answer that, but I just don’t know.”

James Dobson always said parents are a child’s first model of God. Our youngsters watch us carefully and buy into what we say and do as absolute truth. Without even realizing it, my non-answers were leading them away from him instead of toward him.

God is willing to take a chance on us when he entrusts us with children to raise, but he knows it’s a challenging job and doesn’t give them to us without offering to co-parent. When we answer our children with a straightforward I-don’t-know, I believe God will fill in whatever blank is in their minds with exactly what what they need to satisfy the question. After all, he says those who sincerely seek him will find him, and no questioner is more sincere than a child.

Surely God is pleased when we honestly speak an I-don’t-know, because that represents a “yes” to his mysterious divinity. What seems like an inadequate answer can be an arrow that simultaneously points to our limitations and his limitlessness. In other words, answering a question with I-don’t-know can actually be lifting God high, a quiet acknowledgement of his complicated, unexplainable supremacy.

And when I see it that way, an I-don’t-know turns out to be a pretty good answer.

“Oh, how great are God’s riches and wisdom and knowledge! How impossible it is for us to understand… his ways!” (Romans 11:33)