I seem to have a lot of AHA moments while I drive LOL!!! Anyway, I am sitting traffic the other day and the traffic light is red so all cars have stopped. I was three cars behind the first car. A beggar, sitting right where the lights are located stands up and goes car to car begging for money. First car, he leans and you can see him trying to engage the occupants of the car with a look of expectation and after a few seconds, moves to the second car and does the same. By the time he gets to the third car, you can see he starts to not really engage, he doesn’t lean in, he doesn’t even really look at the occupants, just puts his hand out and by the time he gets to my car, he puts his hand out and barely a couple of seconds pass and he moves on. His face by this point is crestfallen and it’s easy to see that as the lights almost change back to green, he has lost that hopeful look and distracted by trying to make sure he is out of the road by the time the light changes. I didn’t have any loose change for him but I had a bottle of water I was going to give but he didn’t even look to see my outstretched hand because in that moment, he wasn’t really focusing on me because of multiple reasons.
Lights changed just about then and I had to move, couldn’t call him back but as I drove away it got me thinking about how similar that situation can be to how we go to God in prayer. When that beggar started at the first car, he had some expectation but by the time he got to me, he had lost his expectation. I am struck by how similar this is to us praying and our expectations of the Lord. Often, the first time we go to God with a request (at least I know I do), we pray feverishly and earnestly with a high level of expectation. We make all sorts of promises to God as to what we will do if he answers our prayer. If the answer is yes, great, we get it and we try to keep the promises we made to God or we forget and just keep living. But this is for when the answer is no.
See we serve an all-knowing God whose thoughts and will for us is for our good and sometimes the answer to your prayer is no, or even wait, because you are not ready for it. In the natural, we cannot understand the reason, all we know is the prayer was not answered because we did not get what we prayed for. And so second go around, we once again go to the Lord in fervent prayer and still see no tangible results. We see others praying and getting their prayers answered but it seems we are not and eventually, while we keep praying, our expectations begin to lower because we do not want to be disappointed when the answer is no.
That’s when we hear people say “God never answers my prayers, what’s the point.” Sometimes we are the ones who say it out loud or in our hearts. And prayer becomes something we do out of obligation rather than a foundation of a personal relationship with God. See by the time, the beggar reached me in the line, while I had something to give him, he didn’t expect anything and was also distracted by what was going on around him and he missed the little thing I had for him. How many times do we miss some ‘smaller’ blessings God has for us because we have lowered our expectations to the point of not seeing what is right in front of us? How many times has life distracted us and taken our focus off of God and his plans for us?
It is human to not want to get hurt but there is a certain confidence that we should all have in the Lord we serve, that His will for us is always for our good and while nothing we can do can make us more worthy of it, here is the best part, nothing can change it either. His love for us is everlasting and ever abounding and while we may not have a yes to all of our prayer requests, we need to make a conscious effort to keep our expectations high least we miss some of the other blessings that God is giving to us because those are probably what we need more. Almost always, it’s those ‘other’ Blessings that often turn out to be exactly what we need to get to where we need to go but we need to keep our hearts and our minds open to receiving them.
What are your expectations of prayer today? Do you need to step it up a notch and let God do exceedingly and abundantly above all you think or imagine? Remember 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18 says “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”
The Musings of a Wandering Mind 