Our Friday Night with Friends guest blogger is Sam Pennell. He is a fireman and will be heading to Antarctica soon to work for six months. He is also my very dear nephew, and a wonderful writer. He shares from his heart on a very pertinent topic. Be sure to share some love with him.
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Today I am going to touch on a subject that is, well, touchy, and it is one that has affected me recently. I am going to talk about prayer. This is a touchy subject with many of us because we simply don’t do it enough, or we don’t do it like we should.
My problem was that I wanted something, but I didn’t know if it was God leading me to want it or not. Even though we don’t like to admit it, the Devil can do great and powerful things to lead us astray. That is why we must maintain our prayer and focus on God.
One thing I learned from my upbringing was that though the Scripture says, “Ask and ye shall receive,” asking God to make your plans come true is not what is meant. I am not saying that doing so won’t get you the results you seek, but you may find it’s not really what you wanted. I was taught to ask God to guide me along His chosen path for me and to seek His will on the problems I had. This is the key to the “Ask and ye shall receive” verse. If you seek His will in your life and you want what He wants for you, you will find it. Our focus should be on God and His plan, not on our worldly wants, and then we can trust that He will provide for us the things we need.
Perhaps you are in a situation like I was in and feel drawn to something, but you aren’t sure that it is God leading you there or not. In that case, what do you do? I did what I was taught. I sought God in prayer, opened up my heart, and told Him everything I felt about the situation and where I felt I was being drawn, then I asked Him to guide me according to His will in this situation. If it was what He wanted me to do, then remove all doubt and make it known to me, and if this was not the path I should take, block my path there. Turn me away from it.
Now, I am going to put this out there because I was stupid and thought I knew it all, but when you ask this of God, be ready for any possible outcome. I was not ready for what He did in my life, and I allowed myself to get hurt. I eventually realized what was going on, and accepted it as His will and stopped bucking it.
When you ask, be sure you are ready to receive. He gives us nothing but blessings, whether we recognize them as blessings or not when we get them. I can name so many instances in my life and all of my friends lives that we thought at first were horrible things, yet they all turned out to be wonderful blessings.
Now is just the time for me to wait and see what great blessing He has given me that I can’t see yet. It may just be time till the time is right or it may be a whole different set of possibilities I can’t even fathom at this moment. Just remember, pray often and honestly, and when you are truly lost, it is best to fully humble yourself before God and literally get down on your knees and talk to the Lord. I hope this shines a bright light into someone’s soul today.
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