I just returned from the village with my coffee. The forest understory is greening this morning. The daffodils and forsythia add a splash of color. Birds are flocking to the feeders especially in the morning and evening including finches so bright they boost your spirit. The trees will bud and turn green in the next couple weeks. Oh, how my heart longs for those first couple weeks of May. I spent a few hours in the writing loft yesterday mostly puttering, vacuuming up ladybugs and thinking on paper. Sometimes I write with my typewriter-like keyboard. Sometimes up in my loft I just take a nice Pelikan fountain pen and put real words on real paper and pray that they will amount to something artful. Bethel Church is doing well. Bethel Church is my Cherry Log, but that is a story for another day. Ask me if you wanna’ know. Linger in the sun this week if you can. It’s good for you.
Learning to Pray
Last week I received an exuberant text announcing that our oldest son Kyle had taken a turkey on opening day of spring turkey season. He had his youngest son Leland along. He tells the story in a guest post. They prayed before they went. They prayed as they hunted. They prayed grateful prayers when they got their Tom. It was a lesson in answered prayer for a little boy.
We heard from out on the west coast where another of our little grandsons lives. He went fishing with some new gear he had won by saying AWANA verses and he was skunked. He caught nothing. He was broken-hearted.
How do we learn to pray and how to deal with unanswered prayer.
This winter I stumbled on an old recording of Uncle Johnny, Holman Johnson, the founder of Camp Barakel, giving testimony, telling story after story of answered prayer. At the end of the talk he quoted John 15:7 “If you abide in me and my words abide in you, you will ask what you want and it will be done unto you.”
A powerful part of answered prayer is to ask according to the will of God. A key to asking according to the will of God is abiding in Christ and his words abiding in us. When that happens we are likely to have the heart God and we are more likely to ask for things that are according to his will.
When I heard the stories of our little grandsons learning of prayer and answered prayer and unanswered prayers I found myself longing that they would abide in Christ and that the word of Christ would abide in them. That is the kind of man I want to be, a man who abides in Christ. A man in whom the words of Christ abide… so that the thing for which I pray and the things I desire are things that please the Lord, things he desires to give.
“If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.” (John 15:7, ESV)
