Prayer


I remember when I was very young, probably 7 or 8 years old, and I knew that I was a writer.  Well, probably before then.  When I was 5 years old, I drew a story, since I didn't know enough words , about my 3 year old sister peeing in our toy box.  Ok, so maybe I was actually tattling in hieroglyphics.  Same difference.  Writers write to express something.  Sometimes that thing is tattling.

One day, an adult told me that the best writers wrote what they knew.  Apparently I had a little arrogant type A personality in me even then.  Instead of looking at what I already knew, I prayed.  I prayed that God would give me lots of experiences, and lots of different types of experiences.  How foolish!  But, that is me, even at 8 years old.  Long before I heard the adage: Be careful what you pray for. 

No.  I have a wonderfully entertaining and joyful life.  I have friends on many continents.  How cool is that?  Africa, Europe, Asia, Central and South America...I just thought of that.  I have been privileged to be involved in some of humanities most intimate and fragile moments-births, deaths, and many in between.  I have walked through a dark valley myself, and now I walk it to benefit others.  No longer am I afraid of this darkness.  I am loved fiercely, and I have been forgotten.  I have been broken, and I am scarred.  But so much fades when I think about how my God cares for me.

I thought that I needed experiences to write about when I prayed.  Today, it seems rather comical.  What I know is why I prayed.  I prayed because, whether we were on speaking terms or not over the years, what I know is God's presence.  I write about how God has infiltrated my daily life.  I write about how precious and essential he is to my story.  My story is really his story.  None of my story has breath or life without the presence of him.

Amazing when I think, my story has been writing, maybe even written, before I recognized it.  All I need to do is keep breathing it in and typing it out.  I do hope that someone finds hope and grace in my words.  I do pray that they are not empty.  That would be a tragedy.  It would mean that I sucked the life out of his story by writing it.  This is my new prayer:

Father, you have been so gracious to me!  I cannot help but smile when I think of the adventures that we have had and those coming yet.  You have built me with this love of words.  Please use them!  May they breathe life into the dying.  May they be a light in the darkness.  May they be a rock to hold onto.  And may all of this only be for YOUR glory!  Smiling again, I cannot help it... Amen!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Blog Carnival: Community

Image
Blog Carnival: Community Community is getting to be a buzzword that hardly seems recognizable.  It has become permanently connected with a metrosexual worship leader at the hip church which has an outreach into some impoverished place.  But is that community? Yesterday I wrote about Facebook's social networking site.  Did you know that there are more than 300 million active users and that 50% of their active users (returned to the site in the last 30 days) log on to Facebook in any given day and that the average user has 130 friends on the site? Is that community? Do we really have a community or do we talk so much about it and request friends by the busload because we desire it intensely? We were made for community.  Creator said it was not good for that first man to be alone.  Even Creator was not alone.  We need to walk with others.  We need our village.  We need them to not only walk with us a...
Read more

He's Calling

Image
I didn't sleep well last night. I kept waking up, wanting to write. Those nights are annoying, particularly when I am working 12 hours the next day so I have no business getting out of bed to write. But here is the thing that kept bugging me...what if God is calling us not to greatness, but to smallness? Yeah, weird thing to keep a person awake, huh? Our group that went to the Leadership Summit are praying for ways that we can put what we learned into practice. Look around your neighborhood-there is so much need. Look around your coworkers-enough need to depress you. Look around the world-so much need it can paralyze. And then I think about this thing with callings... What if it isn't about being called to a thing, but to be like Him? What if it doesn't matter where I am or what I do but how I do it? What if His only desire is for me to respond to this broken world as He does? Right where I am? Jesus stopped to love the kids, he held up important people to talk to a woman, ...
Read more

The Reason for the Season

Image
This post is participating in today's blog carnival on the word LOVE.  To read other posts, click here . As all my friends texted holiday wishes this Christmas, one stood out.  This one seemed to go against all the "Keep Christ in Christmas" and "Jesus is the reason for the season" bumper stickers.  This text said simply, U r the reason 4 the season. At first I thought she wrote it incorrectly, so I read it again looking for the typo.  But, there wasn't one. That's when it hit me: without me, there wouldn't be a need for Christmas. Ok, so that sounds somewhat egocentric, but hang in there with me.  God is this crazy amazing being made of love.  It is out of that crazy, amazing love that he chose to step into flesh, to show us that God does love us and that he didn't abandon us to the evil that surrounds us, to bring us back to this relationship.  God, the first and greatest lover, pursues us, rescues us.  O...
Read more