In prayer, I often find that I seek answers in life. I know that this is a totally uncommon practice (wink wink) but questioning God and His Will, at least for the past few years, has been incredibly involved with seeking answers. There are so many questions that we become obsessed with that, I would argue, become gods to us. We become obsessed with the questions that plague us, when God is giving us the courage to move past dwelling in the act of questioning. A lot of times in my own life I have been caught up in questions like, “God what do you want me to do with my life” or “Why can’t I have this” or “Why do I have these virtues and vices” etc. We don’t want to hear an answer because we are comfortable in the question.
But God loves us too much to allow us to remain lost in our questions. The longer we seek God directly saying “yes‘, “no“, “not yet“, “what? can you repeat that? I can’t understand what you are saying. Why are you talking like that?” (I kid I kid) to our prayers we stop desiring God’s will for our lives and we become more attached to the answers that we make up for ourselves. Sometime God is giving us an answer and we choose to not listen to it and we cease to remember the meaning of prayer. Prayer is where God reveals our desires to ourselves. Prayer is where God shows us our own heart, points to it and says, “This is what you want. This is your desire. This is not some crazy thing I am calling you too because it is what you truly desire.”
We all know he had mind powers.
The answer to God’s desire for us is ourselves. We need to stop worrying about the answer to our lives because God is forming us as the the answer. At the end of John Paul II’s life his last words were, “Amen.” What an amazing way to end his life. He looked back at all the times his life in suffering and in joy and believed that God had brought goodness out of his life. He knew that God had formed him as the answer to his desires. and was at peace with himself. His entire life had indeed been a prayer and ended it with the appropriate “amen”.
To be truly fruitful in prayer, we must let go of everything keeping us from God, including our desires for direct answers. I am not trying to sound like some predestination spouting evangelical fundamentalist but we do not have to understand our cross to carry it. For if we trust Jesus in his infinite goodness we will trust that he will guide us to Himself. Let us learn to let go of the questions in ourselves so that God might have the space to form us as the answer. Let us let our entire life be a prayer.
Leave a Reply