How often do you pray with the expectation that God will answer, but then He doesn't? It seems like He isn’t even listening. I have often struggled with the feeling that God just isn't listening. Oh, I've seen lots of answered prayer! Some very incredible prayers, just in the past couple of years. So I don't doubt God answers, I just have often felt He doesn't always hear me. Or more so, that I can't hear Him.
Here’s an example from last Sunday’s celebration service we had at church. Not only was it a service for celebrating, it was also a time of praise and worship, prayer, deliverance and healing. Now, I have recently joined the prayer team at church...a little hesitantly. I don't hesitate because I don't believe that is where God is leading. I hesitate out of fear of social awkwardness and fear do doing or saying the wrong thing. However, I do feel in this area, God is pushing me to step into this position. Here is where my problem came in. I prayed, expecting God to show up, to fill me with His presence and to just set my soul on fire for the people who were about to enter the church. I wanted to be excited about it like everyone else was. I wanted to feel that electricity many people seemed to be feeling, including my husband. I felt unplugged and like I was missing out on something.
This is often the case when I am at this type of event. Why isn’t God letting me in on all the stuff everyone else seems to get? And that was my focus for much of the time I was at church. About me and what I was lacking and what I felt God wasn't giving me. Where was God? Why didn't I feel Him?
Now, because things like this seem to happen to me often, I'm beginning to catch on to what is really happening. It just takes a bit to sink in. It's all about perception! What I see as God not listening, caring, being silent, or just leaving me out there after He pushed and I finally gave in, is just my perception of reality. It is how it looks and feels to me but isn't really how it is. What actually happened that day at church was that God did show up in a huge way! Amazing testimonies were given, lives were impacted, through live streaming thousands of people were a part of it all!
So, no matter how much I “feel” He isn’t there Acts 17:28 says, “for in him we live and move and have our being…” Besides that, Hebrews 13:5 is something I should have focused on earlier, before church; Reminding me not worry that I wasn't having the same experience everyone else seemed to have. It says, “Let your conduct be without covetousness; be content with such things as you have. For He Himself has said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” We are called to trust in His promises over our perception.
Do you ever notice, when there is something you really want, that is just out of reach, you do whatever is necessary to obtain it? As soon as someone says you can't have something, you want it more. I read an article called When God Seems Silent by John Bloom of Desiring God. He suggested “absence heightens desire. And the more heightened the desire, the greater its satisfaction will be. It is the mourning that will know the joy of comfort. (Matthew 5:4). It is the hungry and thirsty that will be satisfied (Matthew 5:6). Longing makes us ask, emptiness makes us seek, silence makes us knock (Luke 11:9).” Bloom put ,my very thought into the following words, “So you desire God and ask for more of him and what do you get? Stuck in a desert feeling deserted. You feel disoriented and desperate. Don’t despair. The silence, the absence is phenomenological. It’s how it feels, it’s not how it is. You are not alone. God is with you”
While in the middle of my 22 year relationship with my ex there were many nights I stayed up crying out to God, feeling that He abandoned me because of the decisions I made in my past. Especially the relationships I chose and the things I allowed in my life. I was too used up and broken for Him to want to answer any pathetic prayer I had. I was forever going to live in that situation shrouded in fear, loneliness, and sadness and that is just how it was going to be. I know that wasn't the truth. He was there in the middle of it all, but I could only see through my perspective, clouded by my emotions. I wasn't at all trying to seek the truth, I was only focused on the why and how come of my situation, not the what. What was God doing all that time? He was listening, His heart was breaking with mine. He was preparing something better for me, I just couldn't see it yet.
Again I'll pull out this scripture. A running theme to my blog posts, “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” Jeremiah 29:11
God has given me hope and a future! I am so far removed from that old life on to something new! I have an amazing marriage I never thought was possible. I have no doubt I am loved. My home is a sanctuary, where the peace of God rules.
Life isn't without challenge, and boy do we have them! I sometimes still fail to realize God hears me, I can only see from my own perception. If I move towards Him, I'll get a better view of true reality and learn what it is to live by faith and not just sight as 2 Corinthians 5:7 says.
As I've taken over a week to reflect on and type out this blog, I'm realizing and I'm sure I will need constant reminders that praying for others and ourselves as well as knowing you're in the presence of the Lord just takes faith. That's it. Sounds easy enough. But in our humanness, my humanness, I get all caught up in the circumstances of life, complicated by the harassment of the devil. Faith is the evidence of things unseen, that changes or effects the circumstances we see and live in. I've experienced a lot of that evidence in my lifetime. I can't let fear, false evidence appearing real, get in the way of truth. It's important to continue to keep reminded of what the Lord is doing and has done in our life, in my lifetime. It's all about perception. Does your hope and future lie in the weakness of your own perception or in the faith we're all called to walk in?
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