Provocations

By pbobby

I remember at age six feeling that my world hinged upon my being able to get a pair of tennis shoes so that I could play basketball on the gym floor in Lone Oak, Kentucky. Mom and Dad said that I could not have them. (Now I know that they simply did not have the money to buy them for me.) Did that stop me from whining, begging and crying for them? Of course not!

I mowed what looked, then, like monstrous lawns with a steel-wheeled push mower for ten to twenty-five cents a pop. Often sticks would hang up in the rotating blades and lock up everything and skid on the damp grass. I thought, "I'll be fifteen before I can earn the $3.95 they cost." But then Bea Harper next door hired me to mow her really big yard for fifty cents. Within three months, I had earned enough for those precious tennis shoes.

It seemed like an eternity before Daddy took me into Paducah to get them. I was elated the first time I was allowed on the gym floor to dribble and shoot a little more than halfway up to that ten foot goal. It did not matter. Now I could try to do what the big boys did.

I know how many of us view prayer. "Prayer changes things", so when we need something done that we know we can't, we ask God to do it for us. When we are scared by accidents, serious illnesses or financial reverses, we turn to God in Prayer to watch over us and to fix what we know we can't.

Often our prayers are filled with repetitious fretting, fuming, begging and even crying for our soul's deep desire. "God, I'll do anything if you just let my child get well." The Gospels record that Jesus had much to say about prayer; a little in Matthew, Mark and Luke, but much more in John's writings.

Matthew 6:7-8 reads, "When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard because of their many words." This reminds me so much of my prayers as a child.

In Matthew 21:22 we read, "Whatever you ask for in prayer with faith, you will receive." In John 14:13,14 it is written, " I will do whatever you ask in my name so that the Father may be glorified in the son. If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it."

Taken literally, we can control everything just by asking in Jesus name for it to be so. This has not been my experience in my asking for the wellness of my two dead children or my dead grandchild. And I doubt it has been any different for you who have prayed for someone to keep on living, but they died anyway.

All prayers of petition are late arrivals. God knows what we need long before we even think to turn to Him in our helplessness to ask for supernatural favors in hours of fear and helplessness.

Our paradigm is that we have a God, who listens to us and will honor our requests if we pray hard enough. I think it is just the other way. God has us. The only prayers that I feel comfortable with are prayers of thanksgiving and requests for insight and courage to face whatever may come.

It has come to me that asking over and over does not work. What do we have left? If God has us, then we can only trust that He will grant us strength, courage and the wisdom to carry on until we leave these mortal bodies behind and go free into the eternal.

I can only wonder how God views our behavior in the foxholes of life. Maybe just the same way my father viewed my antics over a pair of tennis shoes. Woe unto those of us who think that we with our prayers, claiming the promise written in John's gospel, can control God's acts.