unanswered prayers
January 13, 2012
Some of us spend most of our lives praying that God will answer a specific prayer. After a while we get so used to living without the thing we crave that the craving itself turns into a constant companion. Imagine what would happen if God actually gave us the desires of our hearts. We would have to abandon the craving that has become so much a part of life. That would be frightening. ~M Craig Barnes
Ever had one of those prayers? The ones you nearly feel like giving up on, but you still keep praying them anyways. You pray them so often that you can’t imagine a day without them. They become your closest companions and the more prayers you say, the more you lose hope.
I saw a friend on Facebook the other day post a praise that they found their lost dog and then said “Thank you for hearing our prayers God.”
Perhaps that’s how we feel sometimes- Like God only hears our prayers sometimes. We throw up these prayers, sometimes carelessly because we tire of saying them over and over again. We wonder if our prayers are on hold or if they get lost in the cosmos. We just hope that some day God will hear our prayers.
But what if He does?
What if He actually…. hears. He knows. He feels. He understands.
We think that God doesn’t know our urgency with our prayer requests, because if He did He would answer them more swiftly, and when we say ‘answer’ that means give us our requests.
So it’s easy to give up. It’s easy for our prayers to go cold after praying for them for so long. It’s easy to lose passion, to feel disappointment, and to feel neglected. So you find a companion in what you most long for, but your companion doesn’t satisfy. It actually does the opposite. It leaves us restless, and clinging to a lost hope.
While we are busy wrapped up with our loss, we begin to miss out on the other things God is showing us. He knows our desires, our deepest desires- the ones others don’t know, the ones we often don’t even know. But He knows them, and only He knows how to satisfy them. He wants to hear the cries of our hearts, our prayers, but to hold onto our prayers as crutches is easy. To place them in His hands daily and still live knowing He is good is where we find freedom.
