Patience and prayer have been occupying a lot of my thought time lately. And I am reminded of something Pastor Frederick Douglass Haynes III of Friendship West Baptist Church (Dallas, Texas where I got saved) once said. “There is no such thing as an emergency in eternity.” This, I have written about before but as I said I have reasons to repeat myself today, right now. You guys know about my fascination with man’s time vs. God’s time. It appears that we want God’s time to be reconciled with our own concept of time. God do it now. I need you yesterday. Prayer, I now believe, is the mechanism by which we can understand in some small way how God’s time works. In today’s world, obviously, we all have a tendency to want what we want when we want it, including things we pray for. We want to be delivered from, sent to, rescued from or have our immediate problem solved immediately. We do this as if God operated on our individual timetable and, some of us actually question His judgment when He takes too long or has the gall not to answer our super intense prayers right now.
Prayer itself is even evaluated by some of us based on how long it takes God to answer as determined by our body clocks. Many of us treat this as if God was on 24 hour call just waiting on our tweet. Hopefully, I‘ve come to understand that through prayer, legitimate belief in God’s power, that eventually you will get your answer. It will be the right one and it will be right on time. Think about it. How often can you look back over your own life and thank God that you didn’t get something or someone that you begged and pleaded for? Was it a job? Maybe a potential spouse or man or some woman you couldn’t live without? Now through the blessing of hindsight, the best thing that could have happened is that it didn’t happen. How often would you say that had you gotten what you prayed for when you prayed for it, now, with certainty, it would have been, ‘can we say a disaster?’ For me, it is a matter of faith that through prayer the Lord will bless you with what you need, when and only when, He knows you can handle or, appreciate it. We’ve all heard the saying that God will not put more on us than we can handle. I personally know and can testify that that was not my belief. Quite a few times I’ve known for a fact that I could not make it another day. I’ve known many occasions that I couldn’t go another further, only to find that by the grace of God when the sun came up the very next day, so did I. How about you? It’s at these times you begin to realize that the key is to leave it after you’ve placed it in the hands of God. Let go and let Him. Jesus did the dirty work. Now all you have to do is remember why. “He said to them, ‘It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by His own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you’…” Acts 1:7-8. This power, I feel, is evident when patience and prayer come together and reveal to you that there is a divine reason for you to experience whatever it is that you go through during your time here on earth. Without trials and tribulations, there is no experience and without experience, there is no wisdom, let alone testimony. Unless you submit to the will of God, there is no personal salvation. Without salvation, prayer cannot and will not be answered. So, when you want God to hurry up because you’re about to lose your mind up in here, that’s proof you’re not ready. My own testimony tells me that until I could and did give it all up, I couldn’t appreciate anything He might have had for me. Like Abraham, it is only with total belief that the ram shows up in the bush. May you always find your ram and may God bless and keep you always.
James, jaws@dallasweekly.com