It frustrates me to no end knowing that prayer is a last resort for many people. It makes me sick that it's often a last resort for me. I knew it before, but it really caught my attention at camp this summer. When someone would get hurt, the first response was always to try the first aid kit, and if that wasn't enough, then we would go to the nurse. Sometimes the problem was beyond her expertise, and we would just sit there perplexed, waiting for some improvement. And I hated that I didn't have the boldness to skip all of that and make God my Plan A. I mean, sure, I prayed when someone got hurt, but it was always a private prayer while Nurse Emily was trying to help the patient. I don't understand. It's a Christian camp, and the nurse was our primary healer... This isn't to put down camp, because it's a great camp, and this is definitely not to belittle Nurse Emily, because she did a great job all summer. I'm just frustrated with my own timidity and fear of not getting an answer to prayer. I'm tired of making the Lord, the Healer and Provider of all good things, Jehovah-Rapha and Jehovah-Jireh, my last resort. I want to fearlessly claim the promises of Jeremiah 17:14 and Mark 11:24, knowing that God is faithful to respond to expectant prayer.
I'm really encouraged by my friend Rebekah, who, whether she realizes it or not, gives off a sense that she lives in constant communion with God through prayer. Whatever problems she faces, she doesn't hesitate to immediately and completely commit it to the Lord in prayer. Whatever joy she is presented with, she thanks God out of her deep love for Him because she knows His blessings flow from His love for her, and thanksgiving welcomes increased blessings. I was just reading her blog, which is what got me thinking about all of this, and in one post she wrote that she "prayed endlessly" about a decision she had to make and that it would allow God to be glorified all the more adequately. And the thing is, I believe it. Often people will say, "I'm praying for you," but in too many cases, it's just something people say. In reality, what they mean is, "I sympathize with you, and you have my thoughts until I move on to the next thing." But I know that Rebekah means it when she says that she's praying endlessly about something. And I get the feeling that it's not a last resort for her. It's not just something that she tags onto a practical method of obtaining blessings as a way of improving her chances of getting what she asks for. Prayer is her method. Everything else is an answer to prayer, so prayer should come before anything else.
God is convicting me right now, showing me that I allowed my busy schedule at camp to crowd prayer out of my life this summer. Rather than being a time to meet with God personally, I allowed prayer to become a quick, mindless means of getting something I needed, and only when other methods didn't work. I did find time to truly pray, but those times were few and far between, and they became more scarce as the summer wore on. But now I want to return to that place of complete dependence on the Lord that I was just getting to know before the summer started. I want prayer to become second nature for me, but not in the sense that it becomes a mindless habit, but that it would become my natural response to any situation. I want to pray so often—and I don't mean quick, ten-second prayers, but real, passionate, earnest prayer—that when my schedule starts to wear me out, stress and fatigue would not crowd prayer out of my life, but prayer would be so ingrained into my being that it would leave no room for stress or fatigue in my life. Just as Jesus did, when life starts getting too busy, I want to learn to make even more time for prayer than in the easy, relaxed times.
At this point, my plan is to go back to work at Camp Highland again next summer. So now that I know the effect the busy schedule has on my prayer life, I pray that God will help me to devote myself to praying with my whole being so frequently that no amount of stress of weariness or discouragement would be able to uproot prayer from my life, but that prayer would so completely consume the soil of my life that there would be no room for the seeds of stress, weariness, and discouragement to even be planted in me. I pray that I will always be ready to pray, and that seeking the Lord would always be my first response, not my last resort. "Whatever else I do, I must pray."
"This is what the Lord says: 'Cursed is the one who trusts in man, who depends on flesh for his strength and whose heart turns away from the Lord. He will be like a bush in the wastelands; he will not see prosperity when it comes. He will dwell in the parched places of the desert, in a salt land where no one lives. But blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in Him. He will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit." ~ Jeremiah 17:5-8
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