Personal Prayer Power Blog

 

            In the Personal Prayer Power series I state that I believe that we can find an answer to every prayer.  I base this on my experiences that God responds in some way every time we pray.  Of course God doesn’t always fix our situations.  Many times God helps us through them or guides us with new ideas.  These strength and guidance provisions are both valid responses to our prayers, too.

            Even though I believe God responds in some way to every prayer, that doesn’t mean that I think that God will fully answer all of our questions.  One time when I was in a crisis situation I prayed, “God, please tell me how this is going to end.”  An answer came, though not the one I expected.  The answer?  “Trust me.” (see John 14:1)  

            Does God answer all of our prayers?  Yes.  Does He answer all of our questions in the way we want?  No.   

            I picture our questions of God as the sorts of questions our children ask us when they’re preschoolers.  I can picture sitting at the dinner table buttering bread and the child  asks, “Why are you doing that?’  We reply, “To make it taste better.”  And then the child says right back, “But why does it make it taste better?”  

How do we answer a question like that?  If we looked it up online we’d be able to explain the complicated physiological reason involving taste buds and food chemistry.  But fully answering the question would require the child to understand the sorts of things they’ll later learn in high biology and chemistry.  So at the dinner table we say to the child the reason that butter tastes good on bread is, “Because it just does.”

            I will venture to say that all of us have a few good questions we’d like to ask God when we get to heaven.  Don’t let those questions stand in our way of finding the answers to prayer that God’s sending our way every day.  He cares.  And He responds, even when we don’t have all of the answers to our question “why.”