When God answers prayer, He usually works in ways that we would never have thought of. I love watching God do something in His own ways that are subtle reminders that He is God. He is all wise and all powerful and above all. He will rarely, or perhaps never, answer our prayer exactly as we imagined He would. That often makes His answer easy to miss; that is, if we are waiting for the answer with an expected outcome. And this is a very human thing to do. We become blinded by our expectation of how His answers should look, causing us to completely miss His answers to our requests. We should trust Him enough that we let Him be God and can sit back and see Him in the situation we’ve submitted to Him in prayer.
I recently struggled with something that I began to pray about, and God orchestrated an answer through a strange verse I happened across in my Bible reading one day. With this verse and a little nudging from the Holy Spirit, I saw God do something that was one small step toward an answer to the subject of my prayer. It wasn’t a solution or a finalization of what I had prayed about but a visible step of growth in the direction I had prayed for.
When we trust God to answer our prayer according to His will, letting go of any and all of our own expectations, this kind of trust becomes a healing remedy for our human fallacies. This is how we “let go and let God,” something that is easier said than done.
And it is possible that in my lack of trust, maybe God was working on my request all along but I couldn’t see the progress, so I was troubled about it. Maybe He had to orchestrate this small visible answer just to give me a tangible sign of hope that my area of concern wasn’t going undealt with. His answer could have simply been to assure me. What an amazing, caring trustworthy God we have!
Trust is the word I chose as my focus this year, and learning to trust Him has been a process of healing. It has been about humbling and yielding and obeying. Here I am at the end of the year in which I chose “trust” as my word of focus, and I feel like I’ve barely begun learning about truly trusting my Heavenly Father. Learning to trust Him has made my love for Him grow.
Today, as I share on trusting Him in prayer, I hope that you are encouraged to seek Him with this mindset. Having no expectations, let Him be God. He is so much better at caring for the things we strive to care for ourselves! He does not have to meet our ideal of Him. What a small God that would be if He met our expectations. How much are you limiting God with your expectation of Him and His performance? Our expectations blind us to the real God and create a false image, a lie. When we learn to trust Him, it opens up a door of so much possibility of what God can do in our lives. And every day we can take another step of trusting Him more fully.
