Day 7

End of the first seven days and first week of our church fasting

What I’m Learning About Prayer
Most prayers aren’t answered the way we want them answered. We want our problems to go away immediately and without any residual aftereffects as if the need for prayer never existed. We want a miracle and we want it now.

But it just doesn’t happen that way. That’s a statistical fact. Few people are healed instantly, even less raised from the dead. Financial worries don’t disappear over night. That prodigal son or daughter returns home but with most of the same baggage. Traumas leave scars. Yet, prayers are still answered, and they are no less miraculous.

I’m learning there is always a cost—time, space, resources, emotions, strength. The answers to our prayers take time, not just the minutes, days or years ticking away, but time from others who sit down with us while the answer comes to completion. They require moving things around. They requires others to give. They task us, and tire us.

Couldn’t God just zap it!? He could, but what would we learn – about others and about ourselves? We develop patience because we have to wait. We become compassionate because we begin to feel deeply. We find wisdom when the answers are not easy. We love others when we walk slowly through their lives with them.

Prayer is a gift. That we could talk to the Creator and know that He is listening, that we could pour out our feelings to Someone who can absorb all the pain and frustration and helplessness that wracks our bodies, that we can know that when we have reached our human limitations we can reach toward the Divine — that and the even more of prayer is a continually unwrapping gift. We can never empty out the gift of prayer.

And intercessory prayer, I am learning, is not the onerous, laborious, heavily depressing task that it appears. Praying for others and their needs is helping me understand eternity and how long God’s arm is. Praying for my friends does not drop like a heavy stone into my life, as if the answers were my responsibility. Instead, praying for those whom God has called me feels like a gift because I can help them carry the weight. Carry the weight, not hold the weight – carry it to God.

How do I know God answers prayers? Because he has answered prayers in my life, few the way I demanded, but perfectly in the way He deconstructs them and reconstructs me.

Prayer does change me, and when I am changed I can do the thing I could not, would not do before. It enables me to give without thought of myself, to love others with the mirrors faced outward.


*      *      *      *      *      *      *      *     *
On my prayer list
My financial advisor and his staff as they help clients be heavenly minded with our earthly treasures.
A young friend getting married next week whose job future is uncertain
A daughter whose mother has a critical heart problem in need of surgery
Friends whose employers have announced job cuts
A mom who learned recently that both her adult children have genetically based auto-immune disorders
Our country, the upcoming elections, the candidates and their families and staff
My family, my children, Dan my husband
The healing service at 1st Pres Honolulu at Koolau tomorrow (today), October 26, 2008

Posted by email from 40 Day Fast (posterous)