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.