Answered prayers

If I had to come clean - and I guess I am now - prayer is not the spiritual discipline that I would claim as my strongest.  My prayer life has often been a series of highs and lows, with the lows being the predominate factor.  But like a seminary professor once told me about praying, we should pray until we pray.  In other words, don't give up on prayer.

Every since it became clear to me that God was leading me to leave my current ministry without another one with which to attach myself, prayer has become a more enjoyable and urgent part of my life.  I have learned to pray about things that I once considered too trivial to bring before God, yet I now realize more than ever that God is concerned with all aspects of our lives and not just the areas to which we assign the most value.

A good friend passed along to me the autobiography of George Muller and, once I started to read through it, I was humbled beyond what words can describe.  In a nutshell, George Muller lived in the 1800's and was led by God after his conversion to care for orphans in Bristol, England.  The cost of supporting the physical needs for hundreds of orphans was astronomical, yet Muller never asked anyone for a penny to help with the work.  Instead he prayed continuously, often for consecutive hours at a time, that God would send people to him to sacrificially give to ministering to the orphans.  His autobiography contains page after page of how God provided not just the most basic needs such as milk and bread, but also the gargantuan needs of money to build new homes for the orphans.  God proved faithful to meet every need that he had in answer to his prayers.

The example of a man like George Muller, along with other prayer warriors that I know, has inspired me to be more of a man of specific prayer.  I now have no problem asking God to help with specific financial or physical needs, nor do I struggle to ask Him to heal those I know who are inflicted with horrible diseases like cancer.  It's not that I didn't pray about these things before; now, I no longer cover them with those blanket prayers that were far too casual in nature.

I write all of this as a build up to an answer to prayer that I received just today.  The yard at our house is enormous and I do not own a lawn mower: 

I have tried to mow the yard with a borrowed push mower a time or two but it proved to be entirely too difficult a task.  So several weeks ago I began to ask God to provide me with a riding lawnmower so that I could take care of my yard.  I didn't ask for a specific brand of mower - if God wants to give me John Deere or a Sears Craftsman then that's cool - I just needed one that cut grass.  This past Sunday a gentleman in my church told me that he might have a mower for me and that he could bring it by later this week.  I honestly didn't think much about our conversation until he called me earlier today to tell me that he was on his way to my house to deliver a mower.  He brought to me a mower that he had used to mow his mother's yard in the past and, after fixing it up a little bit, he was excited for me to have it.  It's a great mower - a Husqvarna - but we just call it the Huskee.

I was blown away by this man's act of kindness, but more importantly I was humbled at the way that God answered my prayer for something that seemed so simple and insignificant.

Prayer is more than a few words before a meal or a casual utterance.  When we pray, we seek the very heart of God.  As we intercede to Him we simultaneously surrender our wills to Him in obedience and trust.  God desires to be sought after in all things, both the little and the big, and we should expect that He will answer us when we are committed to prayer.