During our last few weeks of Nicaragua, I was reading through Psalms. David’s relationship with God, as shown through his psalms, struck me and really caused me to think and evaluate my own relationship.
David, a man after God’s own heart, says some really bold things to God. He tells confesses his admiration and thanks God for his love. He tells God to protect him, to crush his enemies. People. Crush.
He asks God where He is, where He has been in times of hardship and trouble. He demands answers. He questions God’s faithfulness with one breath and thanks Him for it with the next.
David and God have an established, strong relationship that results in David being referred to as a man after God’s own heart. God knows David’s heart. He knows that he is human. And He knows that David, even throughout the crushing and the questioning, trusts Him. That intimacy allows David to ask for the things that he really, really wants, just like a person would do with their best friend.
Why don’t I pray like that? Why do I find myself phrasing things to God as if I am in some sort of job interview. God already knows our hearts. He knows my heart. He knows my willingness to do what needs to be done. He knows where my heart really is during hardships, how much my mind questions things or doubts. He knows how much I would really like some enemies to be crushed sometimes.
Why don’t I pray as if God already knows my heart? Because He does.
I decided during those last weeks in Nicaragua that those were the prayers that I wanted to pray, and I asked my team for ideas of tangible things that we wanted for the next month, things that we could see come to life in Costa Rica.
We prayed for relational ministry. We prayed that God would lead us to a ministry that required us to talk to people and get to know people and love people and see them regularly. We prayed for ongoing realationships in that. We prayed for a ministry that focused on discipleship, That was not striving for statistics and numbers and names, but was striving for continued relationships and developing the faith of new believers. We prayed that we would get to spend time with another team from our squad regularly. We prayed that we would be in some kind of city or near a beach because we had so far spent most of our time on dirt roads. And we prayed that we would not dig holes or pick axe anything for an entire month.
Enter Christian Light Foundation. In San Jose, Costa Rica. With teams Agape and Dependent by Faith.
In our first meeting, we knew that our prayers, our David prayers, had been answered when the contact said, “We will not be digging any holes or pick axing anything.”
That is how I want to pray. I want to pray for exactly what I want because God already knows my heart, and He has told us to ask. To ask so that we can receive. And if I receive a different answer, a no or a wait or here is something else. I want to be the type of person, to have the type of heart, that trusts God no matter what. That praises Him through questions and doubts and that has the type of intimacy that allows open communication.
