Prayer

A friend was visiting this weekend and stayed with my roommate and I. One of the free nights we had, her and I decided to walk around a nearby park and enjoy the extremely nice weather. She started telling me a little more about her personal story and life as of the past couple of years and one thing that she said stuck out to me. She's like "I believe in specific prayer." When she first said that I was like uh, ok. But then she went into more detail and started telling me about how she prayed for specific things that she wanted in a home church and community (that she was currently without at the time) and amazingly enough God answered all of her specific prayer requests in two days time. WOW! It was way cool to hear her talk about how God answered her prayers and she's like "you know Heather, some people complain about how they just don't see God working or they don't see God show up in everyday life. It's because they don't ask Him to." She went on to talk about how if you pray for something on general terms ("Dear God, please let me have a good day"), you won't necessarily notice God. But if you pray for something specific, you will get a definite answer. Granted, it may not be the answer you wanted but an answer nonetheless. In my friend's case, had she just prayed to find a good church...well there are plenty of good churches around her area. If she finds one it could be an answer to prayer but again, it could just be chalked up to "not a big deal" scenerio. However, she prayed for things like wanted to feel like she was welcomed and belonged in that church the first time she attended, a chance to partake in a ministry involving the youth and their community, friends and a social network outside of work. God answered all those specific prayers within two days of her 2nd week Sunday there. She felt very welcomed and was invited to a BBQ by a family who knew she had just moved and didn't have family in town to celebrate the 4th of July. The next day the youth pastor called saying that one of the female leaders had to back out of a youth retreat and knew she was interested in helping with the youth group and wanted to know if she'd like to join their retreat. She made friends quickly and is very actively helping lead the youth group right now.

I guess the moral of this life story would be this: if you want to see God show up and do big things, you need to pray and ask God to do those big things. Then you'll be looking for it and when it happens (providing it's God's will in the first place), you'll see it and know God definitely showed up.