Prayer

I am still reading the book, "Prayer, Does it Make any Difference" by Phillip Yancey. It is really opening my eyes to a lot of ideas. So many of my questions, he answers directly, as he, apparently, has stumbled over the same things that are hindering me in my prayer life. In yesterday's section on unworthiness, I came across this passage:

"As if in direct rebuttal, the Bible gives a detailed record of God listening to prayers from decidedly unworthy people: from short-fused Moses to puerile Samson to the rough sailors who threw Jonah overboard, let alone the sulky prophet himself. God responded to King David's prayers of repentance after the sins of murder and adultery, as well as the desperation prayer of wicked King Manasseh. Jesus commended the prayer of an unworthy tax collector above that of an upright Pharisee.

"A sense of unworthiness hardly disqualifies me from prayer; rather, it serves as a necessary starting point. Apart from feeling unworthy, why call on God in the first place? Unworthiness establishes the ground rules, setting the proper alignment between broken human beings and a perfect God. I now consider it a motivation for prayer, not a hindrance." page 185.

Wow! I never thought of it that way. It is exactly because I am unworthy to ask anything of God that he wants to listen to me and lend me a hand. It goes back to that whole trust thing that I struggle with so much. But I am learning. Slowly but surely.

And I am sharing this with my daughter, too. We have been working on prayer together in the mornings, as I take her to school. We take turns praying for each other and for whatever else is on our minds. This week, she had a presentation to make in one of her classes, and she was very nervous. She has panic attacks, and she was afraid that she would get one during her presentation. She has a new teacher and doesn't know most of the other students yet, so we prayed that God would help her through it. She said, "I wish I could use an overhead, like we did last year. It is easier to do in the dark."

After school, I asked her how it went. "It was amazing! The power went out in our classroom right before my presentation, so I actually did do it in the dark!" The outage was random and affected various areas around the school, but there was no reason for what happened. How is that for an answered prayer!