Watch What You Ask For
Saturday, August 5, 2023
Magic Mushroom,
or
God’s Spores of Poison
Cleaning the Ground?
Psalm 5:2-3
Listen to the sound of my cry, my King and my God, for to you I pray. O Lord, in the morning you hear my voice; in the morning I plead my case to you, and watch.
Mark 11:24
So I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.
Words of Grace For Today
Prayer works kind of like a charm.
If you think the charm works you will see it working (kind of making it up to see it) and if you think your prayers are heard you will see and hear God answering (though, not really making it up to see and hear God.)
The charm thing is our brains reaching for rationalizations to affirm our crazy need to have some control over our lives (or at least explain how someone or something else has made things better for us, assuming the charm is good. I guess the same thing would apply to a curse?)
The prayer things is our brains and spirit being pulled into God’s reality that is everything, though many times we think to separate ‘our world’ from God’s reality.
Like the old saying goes, though, be careful what you wish for, because
Because if you look for charms and curses, you will find them plenty enough to build an undying fear in your bones – fear of what curses lie ahead and fear of what charms you will miss out on!
Because once you allow yourself to see and hear God nothing remains the same!
What you thought was your own life, your own possessions, your own rights and obligations disappear like the last smoke from a snuffed candle. You may ‘smell’ the smoke of all that was yours for a long time, but it just is not there. Everything you thought was yours is clarified to be God’s on loan to you for you to be a good steward of, and to share in the best possible way with those most in need in God’s good creation.
Then every morning, noon, and night you will find yourself in conversation with God your creator, asking and pleading, and complaining and grouching, thanking and praising. The life that God loans to each of us is never easy, and it can only be tolerated if we finds our own value and worth in God: created by God, measured by God, redeemed by God (at the highest price possible, God’s Son’s life), purposed by God, and accompanied by God.
As we see and hear God walking with us, then what may look to others, and even to our old sinful selves, to be intolerable or undesirable, in truth is the best life has to offer.
Charms and curses befuddle us.
Prayer connects us to God’s reality for us. And then
Watch,
As our lives constantly change
to be as God intended us to live, when God created us.
Today is another day, running in fear from reality or seeing and hearing God (and seeing and hearing God changing us).