Praying in Faith Part 3

by Heidi Bylsma | May 23, 2008 | Uncategorized

I wanted to follow up on my previous posts about Daniel’s praying.

I like to sit out on my deck early in the morning to have my quiet time. But for the past couple of weeks, since Daniel’s prayers for rain have intensified (and sometimes been answered with a 5 minute cloud burst!), I have to drag the cushions for my chairs (one chair is for my feet) outside. I also haul my quiet time basket with bible, books, workbooks, pens, post it notes out there each day, too. I wish I could LEAVE it all out there and have it STAY out there! …or DO I? 🙂

You see, each day, all of these things get dragged inside by Daniel, who remains convinced that I am foolish leaving all of that out there to be rained on.

This morning, I once again had to take the extra time to drag everything out here again as he had so diligently prepared for rain, protecting the chair cushions, bibles and books.

Now it is only fair to say that, for the record, we NEED rain. Yesterday we had a fire instead. It is so dry up here, 100 acres became toast in nothing flat. This is where I ride my horses:

This photo was taken before the fire had consumed 100 acres.

When it comes to the rain, I guess I remain ever the skeptic. I mean, when have *my* prayers really amounted to much? Ah….perhaps in that simple statement we have the issue here… Have I given up believing that praying will make a difference? Did I *ever* believe they mattered? I mean, have I *ever* believed like Daniel believes? Do I doubt that prayer matters at all, at least *mine*? It comes back to the fact that I don’t often pray like Daniel does…where I then get off my behind and go do something that shows that I anticipate that God will answer.

True confessions.

I simply have to share something with you. I have a little thing called “Desktop Weather” that is tied in to Weather.com. This is what greeted me this morning after I hauled all my stuff back out on to the deck and then fired up my laptop–THIS is the forecast for the next few days:

Last night, Daniel changed his prayer to account for temperature…what we actually will have remains to be seen, but my Desktop Weather thingummie had the following message for me today. We are in the foothills…

I wonder about the faith that can move mountains. It boggles my mind. I am really wrestling with this prayer thing, in fact. I have long been on a quest to understand prayer more. I seem to have breakthroughs and then things go south. The last time I had a “crisis of belief” I studied a book diligently to help me understand. I wrote the author and asked her questions to clarify…and I think something in me got so disheartened that my cynicism was given birth during that time.

Maybe God is now calling me to set aside the studying about it…and to learn from a child.

Maybe instead of analyzing all of it over and over again, I should just follow Daniel’s example in my praying and in my doing.

(Are you tired of witnessing my grappling with this? Why is it so hard for me to grasp this kind of faith?)