Last night I attended a weekly prayer meeting at church. To say that I’m glad I went would be an understatement. There are a million reasons why I loved it so much. And I’ve written and rewritten this post, trying to include them all. But, I can’t seem to make it work in a readable, well-written way.
Instead, I’ll isolate one thing. I’ll boil it down even further. I’ll isolate one prayer. Perhaps the boldest, more earnest prayer I’ve ever heard. Its brilliant in it’s simplicity and powerful in its meaning. It went something like this:
Lord, I pray that if trials will bring us closer to you, that you’d place them in our paths.
Bam!
Often we pray that trials would be taken away from us, avoided. But this woman–who I deeply admire, who is wise in the ways of the Lord, who is facing trials in her own life–has the understanding to pray the opposite. That if the most effective way for us to be closer to God includes a trial…that that is what we shall have.
The ways of God are often counter intuitive to the norms of the world. Maybe our prayers should be a little more counter intuitive as well. Our deepest desires should be to love and honor God, to know Him, and to share His salvation with others. If hard times will help us realize those desires, we should welcome them.
That’s hard to say. It’s hard to accept. It’s hard to grasp. It’s even hard to type.
James puts it this way.
Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. –James 1:2-3
I’m not saying that we should all start crying out to God, requesting catastrophe and heart ache. I’m not suggesting we stop calling on the Lord to lighten our trials and burdens. What I am hoping, for my own life as well as yours, is that 2015 would be a year of great growth. That this would be a season in which our eyes would lock with Christ’s. That we would pursue the Lord so hard and so willingly that we embrace trials–trusting that they will yield a harvest of testimony and closeness to God.AmyPS–You should go to a prayer meeting sometime. It just might rock your world.
