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BARING MY SOUL
When we carried our son and daughter-in-law to the airport in Birmingham, as they left to go overseas, I cried. I had told myself not to cry. Get this picture. My oldest son felt led of God to spend his life serving in southeast Asia. He was about to leave. I knew that for the rest of his life I would only see him for short visits. I knew that I would never spend extensive time with my grandchildren. I had the audacity to tell myself that I was not going to cry. When they started through security, I cried. I didn’t just cry. I wailed. People were staring at my as if there was something wrong with me. There was something wrong. My heart was broken. I cried! There was no pretense. There was no cover up. People could read me like a book.
That is what happens when we get real with God. We bare our soul to Him.
Bruce Wilkinson has written an excellent little book called The Prayer of Jabez. In the book, Wilkinson explains the reluctance believers have toward having a greater influence for Christ in their world.
He explains this reluctance by using two mathematic equations. The first equation describes the reluctant believer. It looks like this.
“My abilities + experience + training +my personality and appearance + my past + the expectations of others = my assigned territory” (Wilkinson, p. 40).
The prayer would sound something like this. “Lord, please use my abilities, such as they are. Give me the experience and training I need. Make me a better person and don’t let anyone find out what I’m really like. Help me to be what everyone expects me to be so I can have more influence.”
Wilkinson writes, “Our God specializes in working through normal people who believe in a supernormal God who will do His work through them . . . That means God’s math would look more like this: My willingness and weakness + God’s will and supernatural power = my expanded territory” (Wilkinson, p. 41).
A father, walking past his 5 year old daughter’s room one night, proudly noticed she was on her knees in prayer. Listening in, he heard this curious prayer- "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"- repeated several times. When she was finished, he asked her what it meant: "God is really smart," she said, "when I don’t know what to pray about, I just say the alphabet and He figures it out for me"
BEING STILL
Before refrigerators, people used icehouses to preserve their food. Icehouses had thick walls, no windows, and a tightly fitted door. In winter, when streams and lakes were frozen, large blocks of ice were cut, hauled to the icehouses, and covered with sawdust. Often the ice would last well into the summer.
One man lost a valuable watch while working in an icehouse. He searched diligently for it, carefully raking through the sawdust, but didn’t find it. His fellow workers also looked, but their efforts, too, proved futile.
A small boy who heard about the fruitless search slipped into the icehouse during the noon hour and soon emerged with the watch.
Amazed, the men asked him how he found it.
"I closed the door," the boy replied, "lay down in the sawdust, and kept very still. Soon...
A pastor and his wife decide to have the church deacons and their wives over for dinner. It was quite an undertaking, but the pastor and his wife want to be "Salt and Light" for the leaders of their church. When it comes time for dinner, everyone is seated and the pastor's wife asks her little four year old daughter if she will say grace. (As a note to new parents: Don't do this!)
The girl says "I don't know what to say."
Her mom tells her, "Just say what I say honey."
Everyone bows their head and the little girl says, "O dear Lord, why am I having all these people over for dinner! Amen!"
A dear friend, Donna Smith, once told me, “I never say Amen I always have so much to pray about.” That’s probably good advice; when you’ve got God on the line, you wouldn’t want to hang up the phone!
A heart-broken little girl began to kneel and pour out her heart to God in the altar at her local church. She did not know what to say. As she wept speechless, she began to remember what her Father had told her, "God knows your needs even before you pray, and he can answer when you don’t even know for what to ask." So she began to say her alphabet. A concerned adult from that church knelt beside her and heard her sobbing and saying her ABC’s and inquired what exactly she was trying to do. The little girl told this caring adult, "I’m praying to God from my heart." But the adult answered, "It sounds to me more lik...
Lynn Floyd
National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation has a scene that illustrates what is probably the attitude of many Americans who pray.. Old Aunt Bethany "prays," but in reality, she is reciting the pledge of allegiance.
[Show dinner scene from where aunt Bethany "prays".]
“Graffiti With Meaning!” Matthew 14: 22-24 Key verse(s): 23: “After he had dismissed the, he went up on a mountainside by himself to prayer. When evening came, he was there alone . . .”
“Isolation is not all that bad . . . it just depends on who you spend it with.” At first glance this seemingly contradictory phrase sounds a bit trite. But, when you examine it closely, it may contain more truth in just fifteen words than many volumes on the psychology of isolation can ever reveal. The author is unknown but I do know that it was a man and that he probably enjoyed camping and had spent a lot of time, perhaps alone, around the old campfire. The reason is, I discovered this wisdom some years ago scrawled in pencil on a the walls of a men’s vault toilet in a national forest camp grounds. I was so taken by it, that I went back later to copy it down in a notebook.
Most such “lavatory treasures” are there for purposes other than wisdom. However, this one struck me differently. I smiled as I read and reread it. Finally, I became intrigued. I began to search for the meaning that lay beneath the surface. Was the author of this graffiti glorifying self? Was he so possessed with his own image and being that he preferred his own company to that of anyone else? It gave me pause to think. I began to feel that the message had a deeper meaning, one that I was supposed to discover; one that I was supposed to understand and apply to my own life.
Of all the places to pray I had never imagined a vault toilet to qualify as one. But, when you think of it, it does provide the quiet and solitude that our Savior so often searched for when He needed to spend time alone with His Father in prayer. I guess after all that not all isolation produces paranoia, suicidal thoughts or aggressiveness. Not when it is time spent in the company of the Holy Spirit. It really just depends on who you are sharing your time of isolation with!
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