Answered Prayer

Answered Prayer


I’m sorta kinda glad that God doesn’t work like a gum ball machine.  Prayer in, answer out.  Automatic and immediate.  Feeding the Silicon Valley habit of getting things instantaneously.  Google this.  Twitter that.  Instagram it!  Now you see it, now you don’t on Snapchat.

I assume that God is more tech savvy than we are.  Yet counterculture in the most innovative manner.  God absolutely answers our prayers but not before we have wiggled and squirmed and hit road blocks and narrow openings of escape and experienced anxiety and fear and dread and hope and love and amazement.

Life giving clues come out of nowhere in places we are not looking. Yet the door we stare at remains closed.
There is the yin and yang of angst and yearnings and decisions wrought with uncertainty.  There are lessons to learn and wisdom to gain.  There are weeks and months of industrious and productive activity followed by feelings of abandonment.   There are moments of sweet victory as well as dead ends- each teaching patience and courage and fortitude.  Creating something anew in us.   A transformed man.  A renewed woman.

And then the answer comes…

When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.

Thank you, God, for answered prayer.

 

 

2 Responses »

  1. Whenever I think of answered prayer, I think of the tricycle story I read in Catholic Digest many years ago. A mother was with her son, who was turning three, at the store. He wanted a plastic toy – the kind that they put my the registers to tempt tired children; the kind that would break as soon as he tried to play with it. Of course, he wanted this cheap, tacky toy. He NEEDED it. His mother said no and his heart broke. He sobbed. He cried. He shed copious tears of anguish. She did not cave and buy the toy, but took her son home, where in the closet, awaiting his birthday, was a beautiful shiny red tricycle – one that would provide hours and fun and exercise and take him to the far away places of his imagination. Sometimes God works that way. We think we desperately need this answer to our prayers, and the answer is, “Wait. I have a better idea.”

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