Victory.
Internal and External
Get your feet there, and your heart will follow.
Get your heart there, and your feet will follow.
So they say.
My Latino Mormon friend with her abundance of exuberance and straight flowing stream of emotions and reactions, taught me one of her secrets of successful faith .
Of course faith is always successful, but often we do not see that..... ....
..............we see the gap, and not the fruition.
Not so with Fina. Fina kept a "prayer book".
"I talk to Jesus about everything, even my dirty oven. He cares. He helps me . He answers my prayers. I write down my prayer supplications...I BEG Him.....and then I go back and write in the answers to my prayers, when they come. Try it, Riverwatch. You will realize, you will see, how involved He is in your life if you want Him to be."
Not everybody has this kind of faith
or even wants it!
My wonderful pastor says prayer is not about a list of things you want/need!
But then my pastor was never a Mormon.
My pastor says faith is not about believing,
but is about being in right relationship with God.
Heck, I believe that.
I also believe nothing will put you in right relationship with God faster than being in a foxhole!
Maybe I have been there.
No helmet.
No gun and bayonet.
"I am not a worm!
HELP ME!"
After Fina's enthusiastic discourse on faith-building, I decided to keep a prayer book, like Fina.
Amazing!
Almost unbelievable.
Prayer after prayer answered.
Sometimes with a No. A denied request that safeguarded me or others from an unforeseen adverse happening that only became apparent later.
Sometimes, in fact fairly often, my request would be granted in a different way (a better way and a better outcome) than I had requisitioned. Amazing. It is true He ignores our advice! I thank Him for that!
Often the answer came as inspiration, my heart and mind having been opened by prayer.
Some prayers remained unanswered for months....even a year or two....while I continued to pray...and then the prayer was miraculously answered.
My faith in being in relationship with God increased.
My ability to see His Hand in my life increased, even when the answer to my prayer was "no".
My conscious awareness of His love and interest increased exponentially.
Gratitude inudated my being.
My knowledge of God increased because I could see He was never "put off" by petty prayers.
In fact if you think about it in the big picture, most of our prayers are probably petty and paltry.
He is our Father. He knows the End from the Beginning and He has an amazing ability to love us and see our (petty?) concerns as real and significant to us in the here and now.
I wonder if prayer is about Him putting Himself in relationship with us in a manner that is "right" for us?
He knows what we need before we ask, but He still wants us to experience prayer.
In other words, if we don't pray, He is still looking out for us, but we are not allowing Him to develop relationship with us.
Perhaps He wants to be in relationship with us just as we long to be in relationship with our toddler children.
After a few years I gave up keeping a prayer book.
It was time consuming, and I had proved to myself the efficacy of prayer.
No need for more entries in the book.
The prayer book had made visible to me the fruition of faith.
I had a need for secret prayers,
because there is nothing like finding a person's prayer book to cause a family crisis!
(Face it. Even now, a couple of thousand years later, reading about those holier-than-thou Pharisees and their street-corner public prayers, we think they need a smack. )
Secret or public, internal or external, in my world the victory belongs to Christ.
Thank you for this visit,
Riverwatch
As my mom always warned, "Be careful what you pray for. You may get it."
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