Unanswered Prayers
Ever wondered why your prayers seem to go unanswered? I have. Well until a few years ago when I realized that my prayers were sounding more like a ‘want ads’ than prayer requests. ‘God please give me this. Let me get that. I want you to do this.’ Do our kids get everything they ask for? Of course not. So why do we expect our prayers to always get answered the way we want them to and when we want them to?
When a loved one is sick, our prayers are usually for them to be healed. We pray for the hungry to be fed, the dying to get life, and basically for all wrong things to be righted. If we stop to think, what would the world be like if all these prayer requests were answered? We often get disillusioned when we practiced our faith, lived by the bible and yet have our prayers go unanswered. “Why Lord? Why? Why is Mr. Johnson blessed with all his wealth and seemingly happy family yet he doesn’t even believe in you? I believe in you. I do what you want me to do, yet you ignore my prayers. What kind of message are you sending? How would I look to the unbelievers?”
Reading the Lord’s Prayer, there is a line that says ‘Your will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven’. Now what I gather from this is that everything is done according to God’s will. Not yours, not mine. We can pray until we are blue in the face. So a few years ago, I learned this and now my prayers are more like ‘Oh Lord, I want to bring you so-and-so for prayer. I pray Lord that you will bring her comfort to accept whatever you have in store for him/her. Lord I pray for the family that they too will be strong and accept that it is your will..“ Whatever the issue, my prayer is always for me or whoever is in my prayer, to understand what they are going through and find comfort and strength to cope with whatever comes. When I do pray for a healing, I pray that God will provide healing if it be his will.
Two weeks ago, I lost my book of poems in which I had poems I had written since I was 15 years old. I was devastated. I looked everywhere. Literally EVERYWHERE. One day I made the decision to stop looking, or at least not look so hard. I then said a prayer to God. I said ‘Oh God, you know how important this is to me but there are much more important things and dire needs in the world. If it is your will God, please let it turn up sometime. If not, let me be able to let it go’. Well a few days later, I was preparing to go and sing for some residents at a Nursing home. For some reason, I kept having this unshakeable feeling that I should take one of my tracks and do a song for them. I tried to explain myself out of doing it as I didn’t want to go down to the basement and look through my music. Finally, I said ok and went to find an appropriate song. While walking to the shelf where I had my cds, I happened to look at a box in the corner that I had searched at least 3 times in the last week trying to find my book of poems. I saw something sticking out at the side and identified it for what it was. MY BOOK OF POEMS! Thank you God! You came through for me!
This may seem as a very trivial matter to go to HIM for. Don’t forget all I did was pray for an intervention because I didn’t want to waste my time looking for my book as I was very consumed with finding it. HE found in him to grant me that request even though I would have been satisfied with whatever the outcome. The thing is, once is left in his feet or in his hands, I try to let it go and go on with life.
Here’s one of my favorite prayers. The serenity prayer.
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
Taking, as He did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it;
Trusting that He will make all things right if I surrender to His Will;
That I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with Him
Forever in the next. Amen.
Bear in mind that I am not a qualified bible scholar. This is just my take on praying.
Related articles
- Unremoved Thorns and Unanswered Prayers (trinitytuscaloosa.wordpress.com)
- The most interesting version of the Lord’s prayer I’ve ever seen…wow (pastormikesays.wordpress.com)
Great post!
Thanks! Thank you for reading
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