Praying for Discernment

After months of praying and searching the perfect car presented itself.

The older I get, the more I find myself praying that God will help me with discernment. When I was younger, I would pray that God would let this be the right job or this guy be the right one. Now, I find myself praying that God will give me the wisdom to make the right choices, or for discernment.

This takes a fair amount of patience most of the time. When hubby and I decided we needed a bigger house, we prayed about it and we looked around for about a year. It was really comical at the time; when we would look at a house and kind of like it, it would go under contract the next day, even if it had been on the market for months. God was at work.

When our realtor finally showed us the house we are living in, we knew immediately that we had found it. It had been on the market for over a year and had been marked down a few times. As I sit in this house that I love so much, some nine years later, I know that it was meant for us. Prayer and patience landed us here and trust that God had His best plan for us in motion.

For a little over a year now, I have been praying that we could find the right used car for my daughter this summer. We were on a very tight budget and we wanted something reliable, with good gas mileage and low miles. We weren’t asking much, right? Keeping in mind that nothing is impossible with God, I continued to pray. I combed the internet for hours at the time.

When something looked promising, I would pray that God would let us know if it wasn’t the right car. There were times when I knew I had found it and almost immediately, it sold. I never got discouraged. I kept in mind that He had a plan. We drove to Atlanta to look at a car that we thought was perfect for us, only to find that it had been wrecked and was not at all what was advertised.

My daughter’s birthday got closer and tensions began to rise. I remembered Joyce Meyer saying one time that God always provided for her family. He didn’t do it until the last minute because that’s what builds faith. I held that truth close.

A few days before her birthday, the right car presented itself. As we made plans to go and see it, I found myself once again praying that if it wasn’t the right car, to please let us know, if there was something wrong with it, to please give us discernment to see it or to let it be sold before we got there.

Turns out, in the nick of time, that the car I had prayed for turned up. It had everything on my prayer list and my daughter and hubby liked it. After driving it home, my hubby was even more confident.

And me? I was thankful that I had prayed for discernment. I pray for it more often in my life, as a mom and as a Christian. We are faced with tough decisions almost daily. Which is right and which is wrong? The Bible tells us that we can pray for wisdom and receive it. James 1:5

I think discernment goes hand-in-hand with wisdom. I think God wants us to make good choices. What father doesn’t? If we pray about the choices before us with an open heart, the answers will eventually come. It often takes perseverance and patience, but hey, aren’t we supposed to be working on those too?

What do you think about wisdom and discernment? I’d love to hear from you.

Have an awesome day!

Wendy 🙂