Day 30: Asking for it

When we pray, we’re asking for it. Literally.

Prayer is many things and has lots of different forms and functions, but the one function that is most familiar is prayer that asks for something. The technical term would be “supplication” or asking God to supply.
 
Now after a while, some of us begin to realize that much of our relationship with God is asking for it. It’s a pretty one-sided conversation. When was the last time in prayer that we turned to God and said, “And what about you? What can I do you for?”
 
We don’t because we know even before we start asking that we can’t do much for God, not really. After all He IS the Creator of the Universe, the Maker of Heaven and Earth, All-Holy, Almighty, Omnipotent God. Pretty hard to have a reciprocal relationship with someone like that.
 
But does God mind? Does he mind all the asking?
 
I remember when my daughter at not quite 3 years old was getting into her stride talking and launching into “conversation.” We were trapped on one of those long car rides between LA and San Francisco, and were pressing on non-stop through the more boring stretches that have you begging to just get home.
 
But my daughter didn’t notice it was boring. She was conversing, using her words, learning the fine art of social relationship with her mom, the “connection thing”—and asking one why question after another. She had a lot to ask: Why this? Why that? And what about that?…with no stopping to pause, ponder, pout or play. After about two hours, I had to say, “Honey, can you just be quiet now and not talk to Mommy for a while?”
 
She had exhausted me. It’s not that I didn’t like talking with my daughter. I just didn’t have the answers.
 
That’s the difference between God and I: He does have all the answers. And because He does, God delights in our asking. Our asking opens the doors to Who He Really Is.
 
In Matthew 7:7-11, Jesus tells us:
Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened. Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!
 
The invitation to ask doesn’t go only for the pretty, neatly wrapped things that can be easily packaged and tidily put away. That’s how we humans would have all our answers.
 
The invitation takes on new dimensions when we give God something hard. I wonder if God loves these prayers best because it gives us the opportunity to see what God can do.
 
Let me repeat that: It gives US the opportunity to see what God can do. Asking God the impossible removes the limits we place on the possible. Asking admits that God has powers beyond human capability, thought or genius. When we ask the impossible, we turn the corner on who God is—from a neatly boxed God to not what I thought he was, and then even more. That, in itself is a miracle within us that changes everything.
 
Every prayer is a crack in the wall between heaven and earth, a wall not put up by God, but our wall of little imagination that prefers to gaze at the limited things of earth than  wonder at the limitless things of heaven. Ask for it.

Posted by email from 40 Day Fast (posterous)