Have we gotten what we prayed for?
Unify our family.
Give up control.
Connect us to our neighbors.
Increase our gratitude.
Grow our church.
We want to be more generous.
{taken from my journal pages in the previous year}
Oh, I’ve wanted a reset. A longer Sabbath. A purified heart. Refinement. Help and growth with flexibility. Revival and awakening. Connection with our city. Lingering family meals. A no-rushed life.
I’ve prayed against bullying at our schools.
I’ve been asking God to give our church permanent space downtown.
When I would walk to and from the transit stations, I’d ask God to teach us to look at one another and say hello again.
You can blame it on my prayer life. But chances are high you’ve been praying and wanting the same things.
What if you started to step into the prayers you were praying pre-pandemic?
I’ve been praying for a friend to trust in Jesus for 9 years. Someone else starting praying for this friend to trust in Jesus a year ago. This friend has joined our church online and is coming to an online small group! I’ll keep praying these prayers!
Be careful. One of two things will happen to us. Actually, they are happening to us even now. We are allowing it. We are either working so hard to get life back to what it once was or we are looking to Jesus to make us new.
To go backwards is fighting life’s current. To let the stream take you along is to surrender.
Hands open.
Knees bent.
Are you feeling this stirring with me?
Mark Sayers, pastor and prophet of our time, draws this picture. The first circle is me. It’s you. The circle outside of us is the family, our household. The third circle is the church. The fourth circle is the city, the town where you live. Which two don’t exist in a gathered space right now? It’s the church and the city. Instead we have living places full of people.
God didn’t cause this pandemic, but I believe He’s using it for His good - to send revival to our hearts and homes. So that when we meet together again, we bring personal revivals out of our homes and into the church. Then the church blesses the city.
Will we be a part of the remnant together? The remnant that springs forth with new life, new hope, one breath, one voice, tattered and torn from the fight, knees scuffed up, an inexpressible joy?
Know this, I wanted to write something different today. I was compiling a COVID Discovery List, essentially our family favorite movies, books, activities, recipes, and so on. A light-hearted post, you know. But I took a break and went for a walk. And you know how I feel about walks! Walks can get me and you outside of our work, outside of our heads, and outside of our homes.
As I walked, I felt stripped of anything pertaining to the future and what should have been. Me and Ben and some of our staff should be in London. The kids should be in school. We should be going to Uganda this summer to visit Saddam through Compassion International.
Gone.
A vapor.
Lost.
My motions only carried the present moment. The present holds our daily bread. Our days only contain what is and when I try to nudge the future it bounces back at me. I wrestle with letting the present feel good.
The songs I’ve sung for years, the Scriptures I’ve claimed as promises, (were I to need them like that one day) are magnified in this pandemic. The words can’t float through from one ear to the other. It gets stuck inside and I feel them
In my fingers on pages.
In tear ducts at odd moments of the day.
In my left shoulder as I wrestle at early dawn in my bedcovers.
In my voice to the kids as they move about the house.
I didn’t know the present felt like this. I notice the flowers and birds. They aren’t hindered by the crisis. God, all the more. Life’s speed has changed. Time has lengthened. A day feels like a week, a week a month. This pandemic feels like a year. What is time to God? He hasn’t stopped or slowed down. I know my temptation with FOMO (fear of missing out) is to ignore the deep work because I need to keep up with everyone else. There’s no one else to keep up with.
But God.
And He is with us. He isn’t gone or lost or a vapor. He’s in my fingers and tears and left shoulder and voice.
And I realize. I’ve gotten what I’ve prayed for.
Have you gotten what you prayed for?