This is a story that has been a little while in the making, so some of you have probably already heard bits and pieces of it, but I wanted to put it all together into one post, so here goes.
As most of you know, in the weeks leading up to leaving for this internship I was spending a majority of my time camped out in the UW hospital nuero ICU with my family because my older cousin Brooks had a major brain aneurysm on May 8th. During that time my family spent a ton of time just hanging out and wasting time. We played games, did puzzles, decorated Brooks' room with pictures from coloring books and Bible verses and ate a lot of food from friends who love us, but in and among those moments of just chillin, we also did a lot of praying. Every time the doctors brought in a new update or Brooks levels began to move for the good or bad, we entered God's presence in prayer. A great thing happened to me during that time, the beginning of this story, in those moments of prayer I found myself expecting to see results from the big prayers we were praying. I found myself overjoyed, but not super surprised when Brooks' recovery moved forward in leaps and bounds, when his body defied the odds and we saw miracles happening. God was answering big prayers and it was sweet!
One thing I realized as a result of that time though,was that I hadn't really been praying that way for a long time. I started looking back a little bit on journal entries and thinking about how I had been treating prayer, and I saw that even though I believed God heard and answered prayers, I wasn't living like I expected Him to answer my prayers. I would spend time in in prayer, lift up my cares to the Lord, then move on with my day at the status quo, forgetting what I had laid before God. I wasn't living and looking for answers, I wasn't even opening my mind to the possibility that the things happening in my everyday life were a result of the prayers I had been praying. So, as I left for my internship I decided that I was going to pursue praying expectantly, paying attention to what I was taking to God and looking for results in my life every day.
If the first big step in this story was when I started praying with my family for Brooks, the next big step happened in Ghana on the second Wednesday night while I was praying with Becca. That day had been kinda rough for our team and when it came time to settle down in our room for the night Becca and I felt a huge burden for our team. We could see some things happening with project stuff and in relationships that could ruin our team. We knew that these things would be hard to combat with conversations, but knew that God could move hearts way better than we could try to woo them. So, we prayed for our team. Prayed for our team leaders, for details, for whatever God brought to us and the next day prayer was answered in a way we never would have imagined. If I could have hand-picked an answer it probably would have consisted of some well placed conversations, a couple apologies, and smooth sailing for details the rest of our trip, instead God broke the hearts of our team with the state of the children's home through a crazy (read "likely possessed man") wandering dangerously close to the children's home while our team was there. Our team came back to the hotel from the home and was overwhelmed by the reality of the threats Satan holds on the home. We prayed powerfully in the most Spirit led prayer I've ever experienced. We prayed the strongholds of Satan on our project would be broken, and from those moments on, there was a visible difference in the unity of our team. That night when Becca and I got ready for bed again both of us came to the other with the same thought, we had seen God's answer to our pleading for unity in His call to prayer. There was nothing left to do but praise the Lord for His faithfulness and swift answer to prayer.
As I thought about this experience in view of the burden I felt to pray expectantly, I began to see that just as important to me should be praising intentionally. I began to see that when I start praying expecting to see prayer answered and praise God when I see answers, big or small, God becomes so much bigger. His attention to detail and ability to work pieces of life that overwhelm me starts to astound me as I take notice of the things He is working in my life. And then, this BIG HUGE God also becomes personal.
Over the course of this summer there have been many ways God has been refining these thoughts and this idea of praying expectantly and praising intentionally, definitely too many to put in one blog. But hopefully in just sharing the big picture here, more conversations an opportunities to share more happen later.
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