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?)
I was just thinking about what I posted earlier about my son while I was doing horse chores this evening. The Lord spoke to my heart about my final statements in the blog entry. That if I was going to pray that God would do a work in me, I should act like I believe he would…like Daniel did when he made the effort and moved the hay after praying for rain.
I heard the voice of the Spirit whisper to my heart: “But do you *want* to be made whole?”
This surprised me.
I was then reminded of John 5:5-7, which says:
One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years.
When Jesus saw him lying there
and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time,
he asked him, “Do you want to get well?”
This man had been disabled for THIRTY-EIGHT years! He was there waiting for a way to get well. His presence in that place, his condition…it all seemed to indicate that he, of course, wanted to get well! So, why did Jesus ask him the question?
As I was pondering the way my son had prayed in faith for rain and taken action based on that faith, I considered…he really WANTED the rain. In fact, he wanted it enough that he planned for it, to welcome it. He put effort into receiving the rain. He DID something in preparation for the rain–the answer to his prayers. He anticipated the rain. When he prayed for rain, had Jesus asked him, “Do you want it to rain?” Daniel’s prayer *and* his actions would have indicated “YES! You BET I do!”
What about me? When I pray that God would take away my desire for food beyond what I need…well, do I *want* to get well? Do I *really* **want** the answer to my prayer to be yes? Or is there some way in which I continue to cherish sin in my heart?
Psalm 66:17-19 says:
I cried out to him with my mouth;
his praise was on my tongue. If I had cherished sin in my heart,
the Lord would not have listened; but God has surely listened
and heard my voice in prayer.
If I am to be like Daniel when I pray, if I am to believe that God will bring it about, if I am going to act like it is going to happen…what kind of actions will that illicit in my life? Jesus asks me, “Do you want to get well? Do you really want to be free? Or are you comfortable with this ‘issue’ in your life? Does it ‘work’ for you?”
Ouch.
Am I making provision for the flesh? Or am I making provision for Him answering my prayer?
n the New American Standard Bible, Romans 13:14 says this:
But put on the Lord Jesus Christ,
and make no provision for the flesh
in regard to its lusts.
If I think about Daniel, what would it have looked like if he hadn’t believed his prayer for rain would have been answered? He would have left the hay alone, but he might have gotten on sun screen and gone to the lake to go swimming. He would have left my bible out on the back deck instead of bringing it in. He might have even turned on the air conditioning or opened the windows in the house…he would have made provision for anticipating that the Lord wasn’t going to answer his prayer for rain.
Instead, he was convinced…he believed, he asked, he wanted what he asked for enough to DO. Could this be, in part, what James means when he said:
In the same way, faith by itself,
if it is not accompanied by action,
is dead. But someone will say, “You have faith; I have deeds.”
Show me your faith without deeds,
and I will show you my faith by what I do.
– James 2:17-18
Daniel’s faith caused him not just to pray, but also to act, to do…a “deed” or two. Not to win God’s “yes,” but to anticipate it!
If I pray in faith for God to forever remove an unhealthy attachment to food in my life, if I anticipate that His answer will be yes, what DEEDS will I DO that show that I anticipate God acting in response to my prayer? Will I make provision for the flesh, expecting that I will never be free from an ungodly attachment…or will I expect not to feel the compulsion to eat to excess any more and choose to act, to DO something(s) that demonstrates to God and to myself that I know God is at work doing a new thing, changing my lusts, passions and desires? Am I making provision, if you will, for His affirmative answer to my prayer? Or am I making provision for my flesh, demonstrating a lack of faith *and* the answer to Jesus’ question “Do you want to be well?” that says, “No…no thanks…not really. Silly me…I didn’t MEAN to ask you to heal me…”
Hmmm….
As I sit here editing this blog entry, I am smiling. God has such a sense of humor. Can you believe it? I actually, literally hear rain outside…the windows are open (my doing…). Maybe I better shut them.
My 15 year old son is on the autism spectrum. Having made a proclamation of faith in Christ at a very young age, his walk with God is nevertheless hard for me to figure out now. I can never tell if his praying is somehow related to his obsessive-compulsive tendencies or if there is truly a tender, believing heart. All I know is that when he gets it in his mind to pray for something, it gets added to what sure sounds like a “vain and repetitious” prayer at bedtime. It might even be added to mealtime prayers, too. Then on and on, forever and ever…until the prayer is answered one way or the other…he prays it.
In fact, sometimes his prayers sound so repetitious to me from night to night (or meal to meal) that I can say them with him…I know precisely what he will say “And protect Grandma and Grandpa and heal Leslie’s cancer and may she come to know you and may Andrea come to know you, too…” I kid you not. I have heard those words every night for at least the past 2 years since his other grandma died (and the prayer was only slightly different then) and my cousin developed brain cancer.
Since we have had only two days with a bit of rain since February (we live in DRY California), Daniel has added “Please bring rain” to his nightly (and mealtime) prayers. Sometimes, I must confess…I get such an attitude about it all…I am tempted to roll my eyes and I lip sync his prayer.
Truthfully, who is the one who needs the attitude adjustment? It is obviously me! Nevertheless, I have had a real hard time swallowing the way he seems to carelessly enter God’s presence and spout off the same old requests. I wonder sometimes if his heart is engaged at ALL in what is going on. (Gosh, do you suppose that his way of praying might just give God a lot more joy than my criticizing it does? Duh!)
One night when he prayed for the rain again…I rolled my eyes and sarcastically told him now would NOT be a good time for rain as the hay delivery had left 2 bales of hay out of the shed…they would be rained on and ruined and I would prefer NOT to have the hay rained on.
The next day, without a cloud in the sky, Daniel felt *badly* that he had prayed for rain. He went out there and moved the two 118-pound bales of hay…he was so convinced that God was going to bring rain that he didn’t want to be responsible in any way for ruining the hay.
I realized that my son, who is all too eager to save energy and not flex a muscle for much of anything, felt he *had* to move that hay before it got rained on…even though there was NO cloud in the sky.
Gee… This sure seems like believing faith to me. THIS is praying in faith. To him, if he prays for it, then it really might happen. In fact, it is SUCH a possibility that he *plans* for it to happen.Go figure.
Hmmmm…seems to me that I can learn something from the “vain and repetitious” prayers of a teenage autistic boy…maybe if *I* were to believe like that, some things would be different in my life.
For instance, if I prayed that God would remove the desire from me to have more food than I need, would I perhaps live expectantly…like God was really going to answer YES to this prayer? How would this affect *my* actions like praying for rain affects Daniel’s?
If I prayed that God would help me to say NO to the cookie dough in the tub in the fridge, if I believed he would actually say YES to keeping me from *wanting* it, and then I made choices based on expecting God to act…what would that look like?
Hmmm…..I think I have decided that I want to pray like Daniel. I want faith like my son. I want to pray, believing that what I have prayed for is God’s will and that it will happen. If it will happen, I better PLAN on it happening. LIVE like it will.
Wow…I have a feeling that doing this will change my life quite a bit. In fact, maybe I will pray that I will have praying faith like my Daniel has…that I will act believing that my prayers will be answered. What will it look like right now if I pray for that and then believe that God will make it happen?
