believing God

I think I’m stuck being permanently behind.

This post is the assignment for Day 9. Days 10-12 are sitting in my inbox, and Day 13 (is there a 13?) will probably be coming soon.

If I get them all done, that’s something, right? Even if I’m chronically late doing so?

I told you in my About page that if you were looking for someone who had it all together you needed to keep looking. I certainly don’t.

Anyway! Moving on to the actual assignment.

The previous day had us leaving comments on new-to-us blogs. I found several lovely ones, but this one stood out to me.

It’s beautiful. Rich and deep and inspiring.

And it’s a lesson I often forget–that prayer isn’t so much about changing God or even circumstances as it is about changing me.

I especially love this line: “…our prayers are most effective when they change the desires of our heart to correspond with His desires.”

I need that. So often my own heart is full of what I want and what I think I need or–heaven help me–what I think I deserve. What I think other people owe me and so God should work on their hearts so that they’ll be motivated to get to it.

And boy, is that humbling to write–goodness, I’m awfully selfish.

I’m currently in a Beth Moore Bible study at church. That study and this post makes me remember a study of hers I did many years ago–I think it was one of the first of hers I did. She talked about the sin of unbelief. Not the unbelief of the non-Christian that says, “I don’t believe in God.” No, she was addressing the far more insidious type of unbelief that we Christians are often guilty of: “I don’t believe God. I don’t really trust Him. I don’t know that His ways are good for me or that He’ll do what He says.” We figure God’s actually a bit capricious.

And so we wrestle. We kick and scream and argue and fight. We want what we want. We try to do it ourselves, control it ourselves. And we try to pester God into following our plan.

Or maybe that’s just me.

One particular time of wrestling with God, where I was praying intensely about a situation where I really wanted God to answer in only one way (my way), I listened to this song pretty much on a repeat loop. It’s raw and painfully, brutally honest. I particularly resonate with the line, “I can’t see how You’re leading me, unless You’ve led me here, where I’m lost enough to let myself be led.”

P.S. I just learned a new trick! Actually embedding the track in the post instead of just linking to it! *pats self on the back*