If God answered all your prayers immediately, you would have yourself a fine prayer-dispenser machine—not a relationship. But God is into relationship, as evidenced by His having been in one for all eternity. Here are a few good things God wants for you in the deserts and ambiguity that stretch between asking and receiving:
* He wants you to have a chance to get to know Him.
* He wants you to have a chance to get to know yourself.
* He wants to expose your idols—and deal with them—in a natural way.
* He wants you to be in the story with Him, co-creating it as an authentic agent and not a puppet.
* He wants you to watch him weave the circumstances of your life into a work of art.
* He wants you to come to the point of surrendering completely.
* He wants you to learn to trust Him.
* He wants you to know what perplexity and the silence of God feel like, so that you can help others who are going through it.
* He wants you to have...joy at the way He finally answers your prayer, rather than the lesser joy of an answer given too soon.
* He wants you to get to see, when you emerge from the desert, that He was there all along.
* He wants you to have a chance to hold on tight to him in the middle of the story, when you see no light—and then He wants to reward you for that...
* He wants to give you a chance to walk by faith and not by sight, not as a mere slogan or abstract doctrine but as an every-moment dance.
* He wants to give you a chance to learn that praying, as Miller writes, is “inseparable from repenting, serving, managing, waiting,” and not an add-on in your life.
* He wants to give you “victory over little pockets of evil,” writes Miller.
* He wants to give you a chance to reject what seem like answers to prayer on a silver platter that have, as Miller writes, “little tests of integrity” attached to them.
He wants relationship. How about you?
Andree Seu/ Paul Miller "A Praying Life"
