Faith Makes Things Possible

As I took my shower this morning, preparing for work, it dawned on me that I never got around to writing today’s post. I have the nightly task of putting our baby girl to sleep, and last night she wore me down. She took so long to fall asleep that I ended up falling asleep with her.

There was no condemnation about posting–fortunately, I’ve gotten over that stage–just the realization that I hadn’t. However, immediately I was drawn to this sign in our bathroom so I thought I’d share a little about what I’m learning about faith.

I don’t know about you (you all might be a little more holy than me…smile!), but when I’m praying to God about things particularly when it comes to making decisions, what I really want is for God to make the decision crystal clear. I think I’ve even gone so far as to cry out for the audible voice of God, a very real sign or some other kind of unmistakable confirmation when it came to a few really tricky decisions that had no clear right or wrong answer. But, how many of us have figured out that God doesn’t always work that way?

In fact, I’m reading Tim Tebow’s book Through My Eyes, and he talks about as a high school senior, he’d finally narrowed his college picks to five with the top two being neck and neck for the winner. He prayed and prayed for God to answer which way to go but even at the very moment when it was time for him to make his decision, there was no discerning factor to lead him either way. In fact, to complicate things even further, when he finally decided on a college and called the coach he wouldn’t be playing for, the coach handle things in such a classy way, that Tim seriously doubted whether he’d made the right choice. He was so conflicted, he nearly changed his mind. However, we all know by now that things worked out for the now NFL football player who came pretty close to a Super Bowl victory.

For Tim, his faith made it possible for a kid homeschooled his entire life to receive over 80+ college scholarship offers, but it certainly didn’t make his decision easy.

Faith makes things possible, not easy.

The other thing I’m learning is that sometimes when we’re praying, God wants us to put a little skin in the game before he’ll move. It’s not that he can’t move, he’s just not the ATM of answered prayers. We can’t always expect to put in our ATM card of prayer, sit back and chill out, and expect Him to rain down blessings and modern manna from heaven. There have been a few things I’m praying for lately, where my prayers seemed to be extremely futile. I was seeing no relief, no answers, nada. However, on a couple of those, as I’ve started going about making preparations as if those things had already been made real, I started to see a little breakthrough here and there.

So in short, just to encourage all you homemakers, moms, guys and gals on this great Friday morning–you can, first, be assured that your prayers have reached heaven and haven’t been lost on God–even if it doesn’t seem like he’s answering your prayers. If the decisions don’t seem any clearer or your ride doesn’t seem any smoother, just remember:

Faith makes things possible, not easy.