Your love is amazing, steady and unchanging. Your love is a mountain, firm beneath my feat. Your love is a mystery, how you gently lift me. When I am surrounded, your love carries me! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Your love makes me sing!
My bad if those lyrics are slightly messed up, because that was just from memory. But those lyrics mean so much to me. God’s love is huge. It is so much more than we will ever be able to comprehend. And we have a direct link to our loving God, through prayer. I think prayer is greatly underestimated. Prayer can literally change lives. In Daniel, as soon as he realized that Israel’s exile in Babylon was soon meant to be over he prayed. The Bible says that the minute Daniel began to pray, God made the decree to start to bring Israel back to their homeland.
I have been praying for a very long time now, daily, that God would give me more time in Turkey. I had been having many issues with trusting God because of the uncertainty. I prayed daily for as long as I can remember having trouble over this issue, my prayer group at my Youth Group had been praying about it for a while now, and countless close friends have told me they had been praying for me. This past Thursday (May 28th) I arrived home from Youth Group like any other fun Thursday after Youth Group. Later that evening my dad came home and came up to my room to talk to me. He told me that he had found out when we would be leaving Turkey, and he asked me if I wanted to know. This scared me, because I wanted to know, but I did not want the news to be bad. Because of this, I was pretty much speechless. Finally, I managed to say ok. He made it very suspenseful, which made me even more nervous, but finally he told me that we would be staying in Turkey until at least the summer of 2011. As soon as he said this, I started to cry. This is one of the few times in my life that I had been happy enough to cry. This is my testimony to prayer: God listens to you, so pray! God knows the desires of you heart, so ask him for them! And best of all, God knows what is best for you, so it is guaranteed that it all all turn out well no matter how bad it may seem at first.
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight.” ~Proverbs 3:5-6
Think about it. Trust in the Lord with all of your heart, do not lean on your own understanding, but lean on God’s understanding. Do all of this, simply acknowledge God’s sovereignty and he will make your paths straight. God promised to never leave you nor forsake you, so why do we not lean on God? Because he also promised that if we do that he would make our paths straight? And that is something most of us would not mind having. It takes faith, but there is so much around us that can strengthen our faith, and God blesses us so much that I, for one, feel the need to praise him for it! God has made me extremely happy through so many people and so many things.
I want to end by re-stating something that I want to emphasize in this post. Prayer works, so do not doubt it for one second. God always has an open ear, and God listens to persistent, longing people. God knows if you care enough about it, and he knows what is good for you. Pray often. God listens to those who serve him whole-heartedly. God always listens.
Even though this all stands true unconditionally, I want to emphasize putting God above all else. What are we living our lives for? The answer should be God, but chances are that is not 100% true. An easy way to answer this question would to be by asking another question: How do we spend our time? This is so huge, I know that I have major issues with this, so I am definitely not pointing a finger, trying to judge anyone here, but I do want to emphasize this. Also, I want to credit these thoughts and questions to my Bible teacher, Mr. Meyer. He has taught me a lot that I hope never to forget, and God has truly blessed our school with such a great Bible teacher.
