Category Archives: Prayer

Whisper of Compassion

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Whispers of Compassion

I begin to pray. I start by thanking God for the day, not out of routine, but because I see the perfection in being able to start over, to wipe the slate clean and try again with every new dawn. I pray through my thanks and praise to Him. I'm only a couple months into my relationship with God and I can tell I'm not very good at praying. My prayers are stilted, there are long pauses where I try to get a feeling for what I should be praying for, and most of the time I can't find the right words so there is just an uncomfortable silence.

After a while, I am drawn to pray for a young woman who goes to my daughter's university. I know very little, only that she has a serious illness and is in the hospital fighting for her life. I start to pray for her recovery when I hear a soft voice say, "Hush. Pray now to console her family.” I immediately change the focus of my prayer. Reaching deep into the sadness and loss I have felt in my own life, I pour out compassion for them. I pray that God will be with them to comfort and console them in their time of grief. They are my words heartfelt, for this grieving family. Because I have experienced the depth of their loss, the intensity of their pain, I am able to pray deeply for them. This is where my painful experiences become blessings for others and eventually joy, when I understand that my pain is being used in the service of others. It would still take a while before I would get to experience that though.

About an hour after I prayed, my daughter called me to tell me the sad news that the young woman had passed away. She asked a simple enough questions, "Had you heard?" The answer that came to me was not as direct. Within me the answer was both yes and no. The prompting of the different direction to my prayer let me know where my prayers were needed, no longer for the young woman’s recovery but for her grieving family. I had no other indication that she had passed away, but I knew.

Of course, I felt great sadness for the young woman and her family, but beyond those feelings I, felt another kind of sadness. It felt so perfect to be led by God in that way. I wished I could live my life over again, hearing His perfect guidance and for everyone to feel the blessing of being guided by His hand in such a gentle and loving way. How simple it was to follow His lead and know what I was meant to do in that prayerful moment.

I also thought of my son and how feverishly I had prayed as we drove to the hospital on the night he passed away. They had told us he had taken a turn for the worse, but in actuality he was already gone. I wonder now if I hadn't been so focused on my own fear and pain, if I would have been able to hear that soft, hushed voice that would have led me to pray a different prayer. Now that I have heard that voice softly introduce the truth of this world into my awareness, I’m deeply saddened that I lived my life without it, or that any of us do. When I tell Jacob, his response below is what encourages me now to share my testimony here. Probably the quietest moment I have ever had with God is part of the inspiration for potentially the farthest my words will ever carry.

Conversation with Jacob - Being Led in Prayer

Me:
So last night I'm praying, and I start praying for a young woman at my daughter's school who was in the hospital fighting for her life. I start to pray for her recovery and a quiet voice says, "Hush. Pray now to console her family" and so I do. About an hour later my daughter texts me and says, "Did you hear that the poor girl who was so sick passed away?" I didn't know how to answer her. I knew because of what I was led to pray, but how could I explain that to her? Of course, I feel terrible for the young woman and her family, but I feel sad for another reason too. It seemed so perfect to be led by the Spirit in that way. I wish I could live my life over with that guidance and for everyone to be guided so perfectly. It makes me really sad that we go through our lives without it.
Jacob:
Wow that is powerful! But don't be sad, be encourage to share that with others.

Daily Bread

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Daily Bread

In previous blogs, I’ve mentioned that when I started my relationship with God, I had some strange, self-fabricated ideas about prayer. For instance, I would say things like, “If there is such a thing as prayer, I think we get a limited supply, so don’t ever ask me to pray for your dog.” I admit, my attitude was flippant and disrespectful. In hindsight, I’m sure this served several purposes. First, it deflected any honest discussion about religion or prayer. Deeper than that, however, it allowed me to push aside any feelings I had about God, His existence, or the fact that if He did exist, it was more than a little evident that He didn’t care about me.

All of this fit very neatly into my belief system, that was, until God began to pursue me. Suddenly, I was faced with confronting my ideas about prayer. I brought this up to Jacob in the context of a situation that was taking place with my roommate. I was completely bedridden at the time. My daughter would pack food into a cooler for me before she left for work in the morning. We had a pretty casual food sharing arrangement with our roommate. Sometimes she would eat our food and stick her head into our room and say, “Oh, if you’re looking for your frozen lasagna meal? I ate it.” Other times, food would just go missing. We behaved in kind. It was not unusual for me to find one of her Hot Pockets or other snacks she had purchased in my cooler.

Our budget was really tight. For the two of us, we budgeted $50 a week for groceries, which included paper goods and personal items. When my daughter would, for whatever reason, have shorter hours at work some weeks, we would have to cut back even further. There were times I would open my cooler to find only stale, cold rice for the day. During those times I was happy to have warm rice with a spoonful of peanut butter stirred into it, if my daughter happened to be home at mealtime. So I had to fight to accept His direction when God sternly instructed me each time my daughter would bring me a food item that belonged to our roommate, “Do not take anything that is not yours.”

My excuses for not doing what He commanded were plentiful:

► My daughter was actually the one taking it, I mean, it wasn’t my decision to “steal” it, so why did it matter if I ate it?
► Our roommate did the same with us, so it was really a non-verbal agreement we had with her, so how could it be wrong for us to take her food?
► I was hungry, I’m sure she wouldn’t want me to be in my room starving when there was food in the refrigerator. If the situation was reversed, I’d want her to take our food.
► I didn’t mind (all that much) when she took our food when we had some, and she probably felt the same.

Yet, I could feel God’s displeasure with me every time I accepted and ate our roommate’s food, so I started telling my daughter that I didn’t like the food our roommate had purchased, and instructed her not to bring it to me. When she continued to bring it to me (because there really wasn’t any of our food left in the apartment), I finally told her that this was a message from God. I was not to take anything that wasn’t mine, and that included our roommate’s food. She wasn’t happy about it, but she adhered to my request and stopped bringing me our roommate’s food. I told this story to Jacob and he asked if I had prayed for God to provide food for us. I explained to him that I didn’t know how to pray for things for myself. His response was, “Have you heard of the Lord’s Prayer?”

I replied that I had. Then, as was common with our text conversations, there was a pause before his next message. I sat there looking at his message, thinking. I knew the Lord’s Prayer, although I hadn’t prayed it a long time. So, I began to pray wondering if I even remembered the words. “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name,” I prayed it with the strong reverence that I had developed for our Almighty God. “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” again I prayed the words earnestly, allowing myself to express the depth of my desire to be part of God’s kingdom. Deep in prayer, I continued, “Give us this day our daily bread…” as I finished saying those words, as clearly as I have ever heard God’s voice, He said, “It has been done.”

I immediately felt joyful and so thankful! Without knowing how my need for food would be met, I knew God had answered my prayer! He was going to provide! Excitedly, I rushed to text Jacob and tell him about what had happened, to tell him that my prayer had been both asked and answered through God's grace. Then, suddenly as I tapped "send," I felt God shinning His love and approval down on me. I have never felt so loved or so much joy! It was beyond anything I thought was possible. It flooded me, covered me, filled me. I had expressed my faith that He had answered my prayer even before I had any outward sign that this was true. and He was pleased. I just knew it was because I had demonstrated a sincere expression of my unquestioning faith in Him.

I looked up at the text message above mine, the one Jacob had sent while I was having this moment with God. It read, ‘You don’t have to pray it, my point is to use it as a template for how you should pray.” I laughed to myself knowing that God had found a way for me to pray for my needs despite the fact that I felt I couldn’t, and then He answered that prayer. What an amazing and perfect God!

A couple hours later, my daughter came home from work with 3 big trays of Panda Express. Her employer had provided lunch for the staff, and these 3 trays of food were left at the end of the day. They offered them to anyone who wanted to take them. My daughter was the only one who showed interest, so the food was given to her. Moreover, there were 2 trays of chicken based meals and the third tray was a completely vegetarian dish, and my daughter doesn't eat meat. God provided for both of us!

The next day a friend had gone out for pizza and afterward decided she wasn’t going right home, so she dropped off a large pizza with only one slice missing to our apartment. She didn’t want the pizza to be wasted by going bad in her hot car. Day-after-day for weeks things like this kept happening. We somehow got another round of Panda Express. My other daughter lived in town and her refrigerator stopped working. Could she give us all her frozen food? “Of course you can!” There was so much food, the freezer was full and we had to start cooking things so we could store some of it in the refrigerator. Every day when I opened my cooler, it was filled to the top with a bounty of food inside!

Of course, this was a wonderful example of God showing me love and understanding. He knew where I was in my immaturity with prayer, so He gave me the prayer to pray and then answered that prayer with an abundance of food. That part of the experience alone is enough to astound me. However, so much more amazing was the feeling of God’s love and approval filling me, covering me, all-encompassing. It’s hard to find the words to describe how it felt, "glorious" is the closest I can come. I never think much about heaven. Maybe I’m just not there yet in my religious development, but in that moment, from the bottom of my heart, throughout my whole soul, every bit of me ached for the day I will feel the unimaginable joy of being in His presence for all eternity.

Conversation with Jacob – Praying the Lord's Prayer

Me:
I think I still have some praying misconceptions and inadequacies I need to work on. :/
Jacob:
Well you aren't ever inadequate for prayer, but maybe we can clear up those misconceptions.
Me:
I'm still working off some of my made-up prayer rules. That can't be good. L I have glitches like how can I pray prayers for myself if I’m praying for something other people are lacking too? Why should it be okay that I put my needs above theirs?
Jacob:
Why can't you pray for both? Have you heard of the Lord's prayer? It probably is the most famous Christian prayer, many non-believers even know it.
Me:
I did know it. I have not said it in a very long time though. I'm not sure I ever prayed it.

[pause in texts]

Jacob:
You don’t have to pray it, my point is to use it as a template for how you should pray. Jesus said that prayer after someone asked him how to pray. Even if you don't say it word for word, there are good pointers.
Me:
Something just happened!!!!!! I couldn’t make myself pray for food for us when I know there are people suffering so much more than we struggle. There are people who don’t even have rice, you know? Then you sent the Lord's Pray text and I prayed it in earnest. When I got to the "give us this day our daily bread" part, I got this big message from God, "It has been done!" Jacob, He gave me the words to pray and then answered my prayer!

The Origami Box

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The Origami Box

My son was already a certified Diesel Mechanic when he was in his teens which, for the purpose of this account, means that feeling the need to prove himself in a world of rough-talking men, he swears like... well, like a diesel mechanic. I mean no offense to diesel mechanics who don't use profanity, but if they're working in the industry they’ll most definitely know what I’m talking about.

My son had come over for a visit and was telling me about his job, triggering him to spout a string of profanities which included taking the Lord’s name in vain among the vilest of curse words. Even as he spoke them, I wished I could un-hear them. What made the situation worse was that my son said the Lord’s name with the same words with which I call on God when I pray.

Later, when he had left and I started to pray, I humbled myself before the Lord and began my prayer, but instead of being able to connect with Him, as I spoke His name that string of expletives popped into my head. I tried again and again, but each time the same thing happened. I tried calling out to Him with a different name, but like trying not to think about something and then finding that’s the only thing you can think about, the vile words just kept coming into my mind. I couldn’t connect with God. I couldn’t pray.

This was at such a fragile time in my transformation. I was feeling so much unrest between who I had been and who I was becoming being led by the Holy Spirit for the first time. I was in such a tentative place, I couldn’t begin to fathom that God loved me and was actually pursuing me. I questioned everything that was happening: Did I want to believe? Would I or could I turn my life over to God for more than a few minutes at a time? What was it that God wanted from me? I was in so much turmoil and pain, and now my connection with my newly found Heavenly Father was gone. I was heartbroken and felt growing anguish every time I tried to pray but couldn’t.

I had heard about using the name of Jesus to turn away demons, and so I spoke to Satan in the same way I speak to God, but instead of inviting him in like I do with God, I told him that he was not going to be part of my life. I had made the decision to give my life over to God. Then, with my small faith and whatever confidence I could muster as a new believer, I ordered Satan away from me. Well, I’d like to think I ordered Satan away, but it was probably more like a strong suggestion that he leave. It was the first time I had ever encountered something like this, and, although I tried, nothing changed. I still couldn't pray.

I turned to Jacob and asked him what I should do, and as always Jacob was patient and helpful. (See Jacob's text below) He suggested that I try to sneak a small prayer through. That may sound like a strange idea, but all I needed was enough time with God to plead for his help. To try this I knew I needed to block those profane words somehow and so I listened to Christian music. If this happened today, I would have many faith-strengthening and uplifting songs to choose from. At the time, the only “Christian" songs I knew were a handful of Christmas carols. Only one seemed to bring me any relief, “For unto Us a Child is Born.”

"And his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The Mighty God, The Everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace...” While I listened to the song over and over again, letting the carol fill my ears and my mind, I explained my problem to God. Then, as I tried to pray, the image of an origami box came into my thoughts, a flimsy looking origami paper box and God said, “Put them in here and I will keep them.” I looked at this flimsy paper box and railed against Him, “I'm in crisis and this is all you have? A paper box?!” I’d need a reinforced steal box to lock these vile words away. I cried out in disbelief, “A paper box will not hold them!”

Once again, in my mind's eye, God’s outreached hands presented the flimsy paper box to me, “Have faith. I will hold them. I will not let them harm you.” I wanted the evil words taken from me, I wanted to forget this ever happened, and all I was being offered was a fragile paper box? I had no faith that the box could hold them, but, of course, a little paper box couldn’t hold them. It was God who held my deliverance in His hands. The box was just a way for Him to show me, new to the world and word of God, that what I needed to do was trust Him.

If you had told me that God would carry my burdens, that all I had to do was turn them over to Him, infantile in my faith, I wouldn’t have known what that meant or where to start. But, the outreached box? I knew what to do with that. I tentatively envisioned placing the string of abhorrent words into the paper box and replaced the lid. My problem was in God’s hands. I could see that represented in the beautiful paper box.

Almost immediately the vile words were gone. There is not a trace of them in my mind, even as I write this blog and I am reminded of the incident – nothing. I’m sure if I dug deep into my memory, I could reconstruct that particular string of profanities, but I feel vulnerable to the evil that kept me from my Heavenly Father. I never want to provoke it by letting those words back into my thoughts.

There are two bible verses that come to mind. First is Job 1:7, “The Lord said to Satan, 'Where have you come from?' Satan answered the Lord, 'From roaming throughout the earth, going back and forth on it.'" The second is 1 Peter 5:8, “Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.” I think Satan roams the earth looking for opportunities just like this one to try and undermine our faith. What surprises me is how readily and constantly I am deceived by him. If anyone reading knows how to "be alert" in an actionable way, please share in the comments below. I still struggle with this a lot.

I’ve been with God for a little over a year and a half. Since this incident I’ve developed a much stronger faith in Him. I know without doubt that He will carry my burdens and He will do everything in His power to keep our connection unbroken. All I have to do is put my burdens into His outreached hands.

I probably have outgrown the need for the paper box, but I love it and what it represents. It is a reminder of God’s promise to sustain those who are trying to live a righteous life. I still use the image of the paper box. It is where I toss my temptations, unGodly thoughts, and worldly distractions. Then, God, through His mercy takes them from me and holds them, unwavering. “Cast your cares on the Lord and he will sustain you; he will never let the righteous be shaken.” Psalm 55:22. Hallelujah for such a loving and faithful God!

Conversation with Jacob - Blocked from Prayer

Jacob:
I believe with all my heart that you have been doing great and growing closer to God. I also believe that nothing bothers Satan more than that! As you grow to be a stronger Christian, he will try harder to stop your connection and work because now you are a threat whereas before he had you in the bag and didn’t have to worry. Now God is winning you back.

When presented with that situation where you can’t pray I think you should do what you did, talk to Satan and tell him that he has lost the fight for your soul like he is going to lose the fight for your prayer. Tell him to be gone in the name of Jesus for there is power in His name that makes demons flee and the more faith you show that His name has power the more damaging it will be for evil. So tell Satan to get out of your way. Then try to pray again and if you feel you can’t, try to get a small one through. Cry out to God, say “Lord I’m struggling to connect right now, give me strength to hold on! I want to be closer."

If you need a break emotionally then stop for a while, but don’t give up trying. The devil wants you to wear out and decide that sin is easier. But sin is bondage. Don’t give up reaching out to God even when the devil tries to block your communication and prayer. And through these struggles, remember God loves you endlessly and wants more than ever to have and grow that connection with you.