For reading & meditation: Psalms 142:1-7
"When my spirit grows faint within me, it is you who know my way." (v.3)
In Selwyn Hughes' devotional "Everyday Light" (http://www.crosswalk.com/devotionals/everydaylight/) he quotes the above verse. He talks about how God is the God of "remarkable surprises". God is a God who is surprising in the way that he works and sometimes in the way that he does not. At times, he seems withdrawn and remote. At other times, from what I have experienced, he seems as close as your very heartbeat. Sometimes God appears to answer a prayer almost immediately and other times the answer may be years away. Still other times, we may wish that he had ignored our requests instead of giving us what we asked for.
At different times in my christian walk, I have kept a prayer journal. Looking back on my notes, from months or years afterward, I see that God did answer prayers, sometimes remarkably fast. I think He does that to encourage us that the answers will come for those prayers that take years or months. Still other times, I see that God did not give me what I asked for, but something better or different than I asked for. Still other times, he allowed me to wrestle with it for that is when my faith was tried and tested and molded. Without that struggle my faith would not be as strong as it was, even though it is still weak quite a bit of the time.
One thing that I also notice is that prayers to God are not times when we are solely to present our wish list to God. As if we know what is best and God does not. Jesus tells us that God the Father knows what we need before we ask. But, sometimes we can be guilty if we are not careful of using our prayer time as a time to inform God of what he needs to do. Yet, when you look at the Lord's prayer you see that Jesus started with praising God and reminding us of who he is. We often need to be reminded as it turns out. We need to realize that He does not think like we. One pastor I know use to tell me, "God wants us to look at his face and not just his hands. Not just for what he can give us."
So God always seems to resist my simple minded urges to put him in a box. Whether that box be made of what my denomination believes is important or what some preacher thinks is important. God doesn't quite fit into any mold that I want him to fit into. He seems so much bigger than any concept that I have of him. He is spirit and truth, yet he is not just a spirit, not by the way I think of it. A spirit has limitations of time and space and God does not. People have limits to concepts and time and thought, but God does not. When it gets right now to it it isn't that my prayers are too hard for God to answer, but my requests are too small and limiting.
What mold have you tried to get God to fit into? How's that working for you?
