Mastering trust and obedience on our Christian walk can be incredibly freeing.
I was recently catching up with a friend of mine. She was talking about how her business wasn’t doing very well, but that almost everyone she knew in her line of work was struggling too. She acknowledged that she knew that God hears her prayers, but also that her bills were piling up.
But, then she said she wondered if God was preparing her to do something completely different than her current line of work.
I’ve thought about our conversation a lot over the past week. I’ve thought about prayers, both answered and unanswered. Of course, there are no truly unanswered prayers. Sometimes the answer is, “no.” We may not like that, but that’s still an answer.
I thought about how often we pray for very specific things. We pray for God to give us a raise for x amount of money, or to send us more clients, or to make our spouses want to spend more time with us, or to make our kids behave. There’s a limitless list of the ways that we attempt to control God’s answers to our prayers.
We feel like we know what we want and what’s best for us and therefore we ask for those things, like a to-do list.
But, what if we were to approach God in an entirely different way, with an entirely different heart. What if we were to pray instead of, “to please fix it and give me xyz”, we prayed something like, “I’m really struggling, please show me your plan for me and help me to trust. Help me to remember that, “Even the very hairs on my head are numbered.” Matthew 10:30 (my emphasis)
What if we were more willing to surrender our own preconceived notions and plans for our lives and yielded to God’s? I wonder if the pharmaceutical industry would take a hit.
There has been an ongoing struggle of our will verses God’s, since the very beginning. It showed itself in the garden and we have an enemy who loves to feed it.
Trust and obedience can be really hard to master. I think as Americans, we pride ourselves so much in our independence from government and from other world powers, that we sometimes forget that we truly are dependent on God.
And when we forget, we don’t pray; we don’t worship; we don’t yield. We do things our own way which usually ends up in some type of disaster.
Lent is an ideal time to take a good look at our prayer lives. Are we praying like Jesus taught us, “Thy will be done”? Maybe we should look a little harder at that phrase and see if our thoughts and ambitions are lining up with His.
Wouldn’t it be awesome to know when we go to bed each night, that we are covered no matter what, because we are chosen and loved and He has a plan, and all that is required is for us to keep our eyes on Him and place one foot in front of the other?
That sounds kind of freeing to me. What do you think?
Have an awesome day!
Wendy 🙂