Prayers answered

I call on you, O God, for you will answer me (Psalm 17:6).

How do you know when God answers a prayer?

A lot of the time, we don’t see God’s answer because we are so wrapped up in our own expectations. We don’t just tell God what we want, we also lay out how we want Him to go about providing what we’ve asked for. A farmer who prays for a good harvest might also ask God to send rain in the next week. A woman who wants her grown child to be happy might ask the Lord to provide a good man to become her daughter’s husband.

There’s nothing wrong with such prayers, but we don’t have to tell God how to do His business. I don’t tell a surgeon how to operate on my body, I just ask him to fix the problem. God can give the farmer a good harvest even without sending rain next week. The Lord can make a young woman happy with her life even if she never finds romance. When we tell God how we want Him to address our needs, we close our eyes to possibilities we’ve never even considered. If the Lord answers our prayers in ways we don’t expect, we might not even realize that He was listening and He did act.

Sometimes God gives us what we prayed for, but slowly and quietly. We don’t experience a sudden and dramatic change in our lives, but a gradual readjustment instead. God is constantly healing people who are sick or injured, but He rarely makes them jump from their hospital beds and run down the corridor shouting, “I’m cured!” The Lord takes away all sorts of emotional pain and scarring, but most often His relief is granted slowly over time. We have a hard time seeing incremental change; in our impatience, we crave instant and complete relief. When God chooses to move at a deliberate pace, we can miss the fact that He is answering our prayers.

And a lot of the time, we don’t see God’s power at work in our lives because we don’t expect to see it. We take miracles for granted. A baby is conceived, and although we are happy over the event, we see it is just a natural process. You can be working hard on a sunny day, drenched with sweat and craving relief from the heat—but when a gentle breeze offers refreshment, it never occurs to you that perhaps God just answered your unspoken prayer. Our gracious Lord does pay attention to your cries for help—it’s a shame that we don’t pay such close attention when He responds.