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.
