Praying Small

And all of this, all of these are the mere edges of His capabilities.
        We are privy to only a whisper of His power.
        Who then dares to claim understanding of His thunderous might? Job 26:14 (VOICE)

Not too long ago I spent an evening in the Emergency Room which led to a stint in the Intensive Care Unit. I was then moved to a hospital room and finally, discharge. When I left, I received instructions to follow up with a specialist. I did. During that visit she said, “This could be as easy as a quick procedure and the problem will be gone but I won’t know until we do more tests.”

So, I went home and started praying for the “quick fix procedure.” As I prayed (and asked other people to pray), I realized I was being short-sighted. Why was I praying this little, tiny prayer when God could do so much more? Why was I limiting the God of the Universe like that? What would make me pray so small?

As I pondered this, I realize that I (we) do this all the time. We pray small. We limit God with our human size thinking. Really, no one can actually limit God but we minimize who he is. We minimize his power and his answers by only looking for him in small ways.

God is so much bigger than we can think. He is so much more powerful than we can imagine.

So, I started praying for complete healing. And there it was, maybe this was the reason we don’t pray big. Maybe we pray small because we are afraid God won’t come through in a big way. What if he doesn’t answer our big, audacious prayers? Does that make him less capable; less caring? Nope. It just means that is not the way he decided to answer.

He didn’t answer my prayer for complete healing. There is more to this journey. But I’m OK with the answer. I’m OK with it because I know, and the Bible says, that there is nothing God won’t do for my good. There is no place he won’t go to save me. Sure, I don’t like this journey so much but I do trust the God that is leading. And because of that, I am going to pray really, big audacious prayers from now on! No little, wimpy prayers for me. I’m claiming the power that I don’t really understand. Nothing is impossible with God.

"God-Normal"

“My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts,” says the Lord.
    “And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine.
For just as the heavens are higher than the earth,
    so my ways are higher than your ways
    and my thoughts higher than your thoughts. Isaiah 55:8-9

When someone says to you “Is that normal?” my response is almost always “Whatever that is!” Each of us has our own normal. My normal may look super chaotic to some and their normal may not be something I would embrace.

What does that mean? Normal. The definition is “conforming to a standard, usual, typical or expected.” And that is where God is not normal. He never conforms and he never does anything in a typical or expected way.

Recently, I’d been praying for something. I wasn’t sure what it would look like when God answered and honestly, I had no pre-conceived notion of how God would answer. And then he did. A week or two passed and I got a call. Someone was asking to meet. I said yes because when you get a random call out of the blue, you have to go see if it’s God calling.

I attended the meeting and sure enough, it was God calling!

The next day I was talking to God about it and it was then I realized he’d answered my prayer. Want to hear something funny? He answered it totally outside of anything I would have thought. He showed up as only he could. The way all the pieces fit together, the story that went along with the meeting and the prayer I had been praying, only God could orchestrate that.

When God shows up in my life I have two reactions. I want to dance around the room in celebration and then I want to drop to my knees and worship (all at the same time.) You see, there is no normal for God. He doesn’t do anything the way we expect and even if we don’t have any expectations, what he does is so outside the realm of what we’d ever imagine! And in my experience, he doesn’t do the same thing twice. Wrap your mind around that!

I don’t know about you but I’ll take God’s “normal” any day of the week. It’s so much more fun to follow a God that isn’t standard, usual or typical. Don’t you think?

As Sure As The Sunrise

Oh, that we might know the Lord!
    Let us press on to know him.
He will respond to us as surely as the arrival of dawn
    or the coming of rains in early spring.  Hosea 6:3 (NLT)

Once in a while we get to go on a Family Beach Week.  This is when a whole lot of our family gets together and rents a house at the beach for a week.  It is one of my favorite things.

Always during the week we get up pre-dawn, go down to the beach and wait for the sunrise. We take blankets and make ourselves comfortable on the sand. Then, we wait. We usually get there too early so we spend time talking and laughing. Never, ever, do we ask "Do you think the sun is going to come up today?"  Why not? We don't ask it because we know it will.

I think it's amazing that God used this analogy when talking about how surely he will respond to us. God will respond to us as surely as the sun will rise. That's a pretty sure thing.

Next time you are wondering if God hears you and is going to respond, remember the sunrise. God is that faithful.

What Were You Expecting?

“You’re out of your mind!” they said. When she insisted, they decided, “It must be his angel.” Meanwhile, Peter continued knocking. When they finally opened the door and saw him, they were amazed. Acts 12:15-16 (NLT)

Peter was in prison. An angel came, spoke to him and led him through the halls of the jail to freedom. After he was outside, the angel disappeared. Peter, realizing what just happened, went to the home of some of the church members he knew were praying for his release.

As he knocked on the door and spoke, the servant girl got so excited she left him standing outside and ran to tell the group who were inside praying. They didn't believe her! They actually told her she was out of her mind.

How often do we do this? How often do we pray and ask God for something and then move on as if he's not going to answer our prayers? How often do we keep going about our business like nothing new is going to happen? Somehow we are going through the motions but missing the best part of prayer....the excitement of expectation!

The Bible is very clear that if we pray, God answers. Shouldn't we be expecting him to answer? Shouldn't we pray and look, waiting to see what he is going to do? When we were talking about this in a Bible Study group, one of the ladies used the analogy of waiting for a delivery (assume pizza here because it is her favorite food). If you make a call to have pizza delivered and you really want that pizza, you keep looking out the window for the driver. You get the plates out, the napkins, your drink. You prepare for the food and you wait expectantly, knowing it will arrive.

It should be the same in our hearts with God. When we pray, we should prepare for him to answer. Now he may not deliver the answer exactly as we worded it (which is a good thing) but he is working on an answer and we should be expectantly looking, preparing and waiting to see what it is.

How would our lives change if we were always looking for what God was doing? How exciting would it be to live each day watching for God to show up? Most of the time he is showing up but we miss what he's doing because we are so stuck in our mundane that we lose sight of his extraordinary.

Listen to my voice in the morning, LORD. Each morning I bring my requests to you and wait expectantly. Psalm 5:3 (NLT)