Prayers - Take 2

Sometimes I wonder if God humors me and my logical, perfect-puzzle loving mind. Like when I throw out a "bigger" prayer request and let it float out there, forgetting about it for a while, only to be blown away by how precisely He answers it. Now that's not to say that all my prayers get answered precisely. There are plenty of them that He answers in different ways than what I was hoping or expecting, and those are just as amazing to come to the realization about. I already wrote about that a bit in this blog post. But sometimes God gives me answers that are so exact that it makes me smile.

Like when I prayed off and on for a good part of 2011 about a mission trip to go on knowing that I probably wouldn't have enough paid time off saved up until late 2012. And how He provided a weeklong trip that would only require using 24 PTO (paid time off) hours, and how I had exactly 24 hours left for 2011.

Or one of my more "practical" prayers, like when I prayed off and on for the last year for an opportunity to refinance my house. I wasn't sure it was going to be possible to get the balance on my home down low enough to get the 80% loan-to-value that I wanted, but I prayed for wisdom about when to pursue the idea. Fast forward to today when my house appraises at an amount that makes my remaining principle balance exactly 80% of the value of my home, which will perfectly allow me to refinance into a traditional mortgage. I couldn’t have predicted what the housing market would do, and consequently couldn’t aim to pre-pay my mortgage down to this exact amount, it’s just what happened.

As I mentioned in my other blog post, recently I've taken notice of how sometimes He answers prayers more quickly than I'd expect, and sometimes He does so in ways that I couldn't have dreamed up myself. And then sometimes He brings about exactly what I'd been asking for in a way that couldn't be more perfectly wrapped up with a bow than it already is. 

If you're wondering why I'm blogging about prayer for a second time, it's because I feel like God's been trying to teach me something about prayer recently as prayer itself has been on my mind a lot. For one, because I think I need a better understanding of it and that's something I'm still working on. I think I have a good concept of what it means to pray within His Will, but there are other facets of prayer that I'm still working on. But mainly, I think that God has been gently reminding me that He knows what He's doing at a time when He knew I'd need it.

Recently as I was discussing a situation in my life with an older and wiser woman, she told me that I needed to keep praying about it. Initially her answer frustrated me because I was sick of praying about the situation, I wanted an action to take. I wanted a solution...pronto. I wanted my prayer about the situation to be answered by her telling me an action to take. The idea of continuing to pray about it for who knows how long just had me agitated. It was then that I came to the realization that due to the fact that I wasn't feeling like God was going to answer this prayer that I didn't want to keep praying about it. Instead of trusting Him with it completely, I was going to try to find my own way (while praying about it for good measure, of course). But sometimes God has gentle ways of reminding us about the fact that He is indeed in control.

I've written this blog post mainly for my own benefit as I want to be able to look back on it someday and remember where I am at now. Hopefully someday I'll be able to tell you about one of two things. Either about how He answered my prayers about this current situation the way that I want it to be answered, or about how He used this frustrating situation in my life to teach me about something far greater. At this point I have no doubt that one of those two things is going to be the end result.