Gracie Girl Blog

I was thinking recently about what might keep people from believing in God, why faith might feel really far fetched. I came to this conclusion – we sometimes believe God breaks promises.

We hear and preach “Take delight in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart” (Psalm 37:4) and “Ask and it will be given to you” (Matthew 7:7) only to turn around and not always get what we are praying for. We take these verses and twist them into our instant-gratification mindset, yes God promises these things, but not the way we might think. There are inconsistencies between how we read the verses and what they really mean.

Everyone has been there: We pray for physical healing that doesn’t come. We pray we will do well on a test, then we don’t. We pray a friend will turn off the path they are on and they don’t. We pray a conflict can be resolved and nothing gets better. We pray a grandparent won’t die just yet, then they do.

In all honesty, I’ve experience what I’d call prayer fatigue. I’ve questioned why keep praying if God is going to let awful things happen anyway?

So… is God breaking the promises He made? Do we keep asking? Do we keep praying?

I have an all too real example that happened on a recent Thursday. I needed a 57% on my statistics final to pass the class. I naturally woke up early, before my alarm (this almost never happens), read my Bible while the sun came up, and got Dunkin iced coffee all ahead of my pre-made schedule for the day. I reviewed for about an hour and began the test early than expected.

It took me 2.5 hours, didn’t have most of the questions I had studied, and I was 4.5% from the grade I needed. I hopped on a rollercoaster of tears and anger I was a few points away from avoiding. Why do I bring this up?

I had prayed for this test. Heck, I had at least 4 friends praying on my behalf for this test. I had such a good morning only for this to ruin the day.

I’m not even going to sit here and tell you my outlook changed soon after because it did not. I was mad at myself. Of all the things I’m known for, failing is not one of them, especially when it comes to school.  Mad at myself for being sooo close. Embarrassed that I messed up a freshman level course. Mad at the class structure for being so difficult.

Alright, so I studied and prayed for the test. Why didn’t God help me out? He likes giving wisdom, right? He wants me to succeed, doesn’t he? I even felt like He woke me up early to give me a head start on this day, yet here I am failing BIT 2405.

Here’s what I learned: I shouldn’t seek my self-defined success to glorify God, I should seek what God defines as success for me and that will glorify him. That means seeking him through prayer, worship, and opening the Bible. When you seek personal success in your endeavors, you may or may not find it. When you seek God, you always find Him.

I found God on that Thursday. I spent time with Him in the morning, I worshipped Him in the car on the way to Dunkin, and I was frustrated with Him, too. But He was there, and I would choose an ever-present God over a passing  grade any day. 

Let me break down the verses a little:

Take delight in the LORD,

And he will give you the desires of your heart.

Psalm 37:4

We are first instructed to take delight in the Lord because that changes our hearts desires, and then we pray for what God wants instead of just what we want. We pray because it changes us before our circumstance change.

The secret? The detail that gets left out so often?

What our hearts most deeply desire and need is the Father himself. Jesus himself. The Holy Spirit, too.

God gives you the desires of your heart because He is always giving Himself.

Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.

Matthew 7:7-8

Ask, seek, and you will find because your desire for healing, for success, for wisdom, for deliverance is really a desire for God who fulfills those things for you.

I don’t know why your good prayers- prayers for healing and restoration, weren’t answered the way you were hoping. This moves into the “why does a good God let bad things happen” and “what do we as humans really deserve” conversation, which are questions for another blog post. But I do know this- I always come out of hard situations better when I pray through them, and I look back at some of my unanswered prayers now- some friendships that didn’t work out, some healing that didn’t happen when I wanted it to- and can see how God knew better than me.

Prayer often isn’t the cute little kid kneeling by the bedside asking for a new toy. Sometimes, my prayers sound pretty angry, include words I won’t write here, and are much messier and tear-ridden than I’d like to admit. And honestly I’m still learning this lesson myself, learning just how essential prayer is.

God doesn’t break his promises, He gives good things and he does answer prayers, even though sometimes its not what we thought we needed or when we thought we needed it. God has yet to let me down, and I think if you are patient, you’ll learn He hasn’t let you down either.

Friend, keep praying. Friend, start praying. If you don’t know how, God delights in your asking, so ask.

P.S. At school we throw around this phrase “freshman moments” when talking about embarrassing things, especially mistakes only a freshman in college would make. Well, my greatest freshman moment is that I was never actually failing that class– I was calculating my grade wrong (which brings up questions about my ability to do simple math but let’s ignore that for now). After emailing my professor a few times, I learned I actually had 7% over the minimum I needed and didn’t even need to take the optional final I spent a whole week fervently studying for. Safe to say I was relieved and had to send some embarrassing texts. I had passed the class before even taking the test and I’m sure there’s a biblical analogy in there somewhere but for now I hope you get a good laugh out of this, I eventually did.