Pray and keep on praying

Be patient in trouble, and keep on praying. (Romans 12:12)

Luther said, "To be a Christian without prayer is no more possible than to be alive without breathing." So many believers have such a hard time with prayer, though. It is as though you begin to pray and your mind is making your shopping list, calculating the budget, or thinking about the outcome of the baseball game last night. We get distracted in prayer - we all try to focus, but then our mind does its own thing. Perhaps that is why we are told to take every thought captive (2 Corinthians 10:5). God knows our tendency to get 'mind-napped' when we pray!

It is said that prayer doesn't change God's mind, but it sure can change ours, can it not? We go to God with one thing on our mind, almost as though we know what we expect him to do or say in response to our prayer. We soon find ourselves thinking about things in a different way and wonder what happened. It is because God was at work THROUGH OUR PRAYERS changing how we see the issue or what we should do to respond to it. Maybe this is how we can actually find ourselves finding patience when troubles come our way! It isn't that God changes the situation as much as he changes our heart's response to it.

Corrie Ten Boom reminds us, "Any concern too small to be turned into a prayer is too small to be made into a burden." How many burdens do we carry that we should have turned over to God in prayer? If you are like me, you heap those burdens into your 'gunny sack' of concerns and hoist them over your shoulder, thinking you can 'shoulder the burden' for a bit longer. At some point, the burdens you carry become too hard to carry any longer. Why? You were never intended to carry them at all! You weren't even supposed to keep that 'gunny sack' to carry them in!

Troubles will come. Times will be less than perfect. Issues will arise that are out of your control. Others will come upon you like a thief in the night, catching you totally unaware. Remember this - you weren't meant to carry those, nor were you meant to 'figure out' the solution on your own. God might be allowing them to give you an opportunity to see something you have been missing, or he may be allowing them so that you will draw closer to him, listening more intently to his voice. Regardless of the reason for the difficulties and burdens that life wants to heap upon you, you can and should take them to Jesus.

To some, prayer is a set of recited words. To the one who is deeply in love with Jesus, prayer is a means of drawing near, sharing your heart, and hearing his instructions on what to do next. Remember, God uses prayer to change us - we might just not realize how much he is changing until we are a ways down the road. Just sayin!