Last summer, my daughter lost her diamond ring that her nana gave her as a gift. I actually wouldn’t let her wear the ring till that week because I didn’t feel that she was old enough and responsible enough to wear it without losing it. I guess I didn’t wait long enough because on that day, through her tears, she told me that it was gone. The first thing that popped in my head, aside from being very upset at her, was a story I read a long time ago in the book, Is That Really You, God? By Loren Cummingham. Loren told the story of when he was a child and his mother gave him money to go buy milk. To shorten the story, by the time Loren got to the place to buy the milk the money was gone. On returning to his mother the first thing she said was, "Come, son, let’s pray. We’ll ask God to show us where that money is." And indeed, God showed her where it was and they found it. I left our apartment and began to retrace our steps from earlier in the day, praying for God to show me where the ring was. I couldn’t find it anywhere. At this point my anger turned away from my daughter and towards God. “God, you showed Loren and his mother where to find the money. Why are you not showing me where to find this ring? Where are you? Why doesn’t stuff like that happen to me? Why don’t you answer my prayers? You aren’t supposed to show favoritism.” I needed God to help me find this ring, not only because of the value of the ring, but because I needed to know that God does hear my prayers and that he does answer them. I needed to know that this whole prayer thing doesn’t just work for the people writing the books or the ones in the movies or for what I thought might be the more important people out there. I needed to know that I’m not a second class Christian when it comes to the way God looks at me and responds to me. After talking to God about the situation for some time, my daughter who had been praying to God herself, walked in the room with a smile on her face. She had found the ring. My God does hear me! Not only did this situation resolve my questioning but my daughter learned first hand how prayer works.
I can vividly remember the first time in my life that I realized that God does answer prayer. It was the day of my sister’s sweet sixteen party. My parents worked hard planning for the big day, which included lots of people, food and even a D.J. Dark clouds moved in even before we were done setting up everything for the party that evening. If it rained, we couldn’t have the party outside as planned and we couldn’t have the D.J. To me this seemed like the end of the world. I found myself in my room face down in my pillow, crying out to God. I think I must have prayed for what seemed like forever. Tears streaming down my face, “God, please don’t let it rain!” And it didn’t. The clouds held the rain in till exactly 9pm, the time that was written on the invitations that the party would be over. You couldn’t tell me that God wasn’t real or that he didn’t hear my prayers that day.
Those times when I was younger, God keeps bringing me back to. He was showing me as a child to have faith. Maybe because He knows when we get older we seem to doubt more, or we seem to lack in that child like faith that we used to have. Maybe He came through in such big ways to remind us for days ahead when bigger things come our way. I don’t know, but I do know that bigger things have come my way since then and he is constantly reminding of what he has done in the past. You see I need those stories from my past and even other people’s stories to lean on during the hard times that come up in the present. Sometimes we forget that God did move and He will move on our behalf again.
