I recently wrote about a struggle I have been having with the Lord on the topic of the power of prayer and faith in a blog titled Where is the Lord?. “How can I expect the Lord will heal someone the 38th tme I pray healing when nothing’s happened the previous 37?” I had been wondering. “It’s like the Lord is toying with me.”
I expressed this to James Spano last week. He listened and said some things. One thing he said stuck with me. “Wouldn’t it be easy to have faith and pray expectantly if each time the Lord answered with miracles and wonders?” he said. “I think your faith is greater now because of this.” A light went on in my head then and I realized I had been living selfishly. I wanted to see something tangible and powerful from God, as if He needed to prove something to me. What a presumptuous and prideful knucklehead I was to think such a thing!
If I can go back the second time and still pray with faith that the Lord will heal, my faith is greater. How much greater will it be after 37 failures?
Another thing I learned through this and the help of my sister Talia (who I was able to hang out with for a couple days in Bangkok last week!) is that this World Race is most certainly not about what I can do for the people of Thailand, Cambodia, Swaziland, or Mexico. It’s about experiencing God in a new way, a personal, intimate, and powerful way that’ll change me forever. It’s about me seeking God with all my heart and finding Him in community living, in new cultures, in personal prayer times, in witnessing the impoverished, the broken, and the hungry, and going through these personal struggles. Through all this the Lord will reveal Himself to me and naturally be poured out into whoever I am with, whether it be the Thai people, the Cambodians, Swazis, or Mexicans. And I’ll be damned if I let these experiences take me nowhere when I’m through.
