I had a really cool prayer time this morning. out of that time came a realization: how many times do we pray to get out of something that God might be wanting to use for a cool teaching moment, or a time of building or learning, etc.? For example, the last couple of days my knee has really been hurting a lot for some reason. My initial reaction was to pray for the pain to go away. But as i got ready to do that, I realized how we do that in so many areas of our lives. So instead, I prayed that it was uncomfortable, but if God had something to show me through the discomfort, that He would. But if it was His will to remove the pain, that’s cool too. He kinda did both – the pain is mostly gone, and He used it for a cool teaching moment :o)
There’s one situation in my life I’ve been doing that in especially. For so long I’ve been praying for God to do this thing – for His plan to come to fruition in a specific area of my life. I know i’ve spent a whole lot of my prayer life over the last umpteen years doing that. I’ve essentially been praying that God would shorten the time I have to learn from Him through this. And yes, when the time is right that He does bring this to fruition, that’s totally awesome, I’m super stoked about that of course. But in the meantime, I don’t want the time He has set aside to teach me shortened.
That’s just really cool to me, I’ve never really thought about things from this light before :o) I’m not saying that we shouldn’t pray about stuff going on in our lives – especially difficult things, because we definitely need to. We just need to be careful what we’re praying, and be sensitive to how the Holy Spirit leads us to pray. Sometimes God will answer how we hope He will, and sometimes He will answer us as He did Paul in 2 Corinthians 12, “My Grace is sufficient for you.”