If we look at the way we petition God, we might not be surprised that the positive answers we seek are long in arriving, for they are prayed without the faith which Jesus always mentions as a prerequisite. "Go in peace, your faith has saved you." It wasn't the whining or the repetition, but the faith that got the answer. Evidently, Jesus doesn't want us to beg him for cures or whatever, but simply to lift up in trust the people or needs for which we are praying and remind him of what he already knows. I always loved Mary's, "they have no wine." She didn't say, "Please, Son, save them from embarrassment, produce some wine for them, please Son...please..." Oh, to be faith-filled enough to pray that way! A friend in the Marines in Afghanistan described digging a bulldozer out of the mud...quite an analogy to what our prayers are like, Praying, "get the bulldozer loose" didn't help, but shoveling, shoveling, shoveling, and did I say shoveling? in God's presence worked. In my own experience, I with several other friends looked for a young calf for hours in a cornfield, even to the point of "mooing"to attract it, but all to no avail. We left frustrated, only to see the next morning that the calf had found its mother without our intervention. May we at some point in our lives learn how to pray by simply "laying it gently before the Lord."
Bro. Rene
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