How Prayer Is Teaching Me to Be Patient

I’m a literal person. I struggle to enjoy stories with unrealistic, abstract concepts like time travel or multiple dimensions. I suppose I like everything, even my entertainment, to be neat and tidy and linear. (This is probably why I love Disney movies so much.)

As soon as I was old enough to understand that God is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient, prayer stopped making sense to me. I constantly asked myself, “Why would I ask God to do something when he’s already got eternity all mapped out?”

By the time I graduated from college, faced my mom’s diagnosis of early onset Alzheimer’s disease, and got married, my prayer life was basically nonexistent. Deep in the throes of grief, anxiety, and depression, my relationship with God became much like my relationship with my earthly father (and just about everyone else around me). I didn’t think God could be trusted with my pain. I had zeroed in on his authority and completely missed his mercy.

After several years of fellowship with other, wiser believers, I discovered prayer is not at all about changing God, but instead is about changing me. I remember studying the book of Jonah during that time and being shocked to learn that God sometimes changes his mind. Yet God uses his show of compassion toward the Ninevites to develop the character of his famously reluctant prophet.

Read more at The Glorious Table.