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Sunday, June 12, 2016

Answered Prayers

"Lord, help this broken person minister to other broken people". I don't know how many times I have prayed this prayer or wrote it in my journal and yet I am still surprised when life breaks me and I ask "why?". As I ran across this prayer as I thumbed through my old journal the other day, I was suddenly struck with The Lords faithfulness. I recognized his hand in my pain in a whole new way. I stopped dead in my tracks and said audibly, "I asked for this?"!

You see, The Lord knows our hearts desires and He knows what we are created for and He writes our story with this in perfect view. We on the other hand, often don't even know what we have prayed for over and over again. We have desires that we are not aware are deeply imbedded in our very design. Often, these answers to prayer come in the form of pain, rejection, cancer, betrayal, death.....

This song by switch foot speaks to me of the contradiction we often see in life. http://youtu.be/s_Lv8z9RuPA
The chorus says:

I know that there's a meaning to it all
A little resurrection every time I fall
You got your babies, I got my hearses
Every blessing comes with a set of curses
I got my vices, I got my vice verses
These are my vice verses
These are my vice verses

Things are not always as they appear. So often I look at the difficulty I'm going through and don't recognize the greater purpose behind the pain; The resurrection that the Lord is bringing out of the very thing we felt would be our demise. He is desiring to give us the desires of our heart and often this is accomplished through experiences we don't want to experience. What I see as rejection, God sees the other way around. He sees the acceptance that another human will experience because of my rejection. When I see death, He sees the life that is realized through that death. 

As I sat this week with someone who was broken and at the bottom, I was able to tell her that I have been there too and I don't judge her. She believed me. She cried. She shared her pain and I cried with her. Only because of my own pain, was I able to understand hers. The lord knew this and so has let me reach the bottom many times in my life. He did it for love. Love for me and love for those He knows I will be able to reach because of my own brokenness. 

If you find yourself at a place in life where you don't understand why it looks so wrong....why it isn't what you pictured your life to turn out to be, remember things are not always as they appear. Lean into the pain and allow it to mold you into the vessel God has prepared you to be. And remember above all that He loves you! 



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