PRAYER WAITING

My all-time favorite preacher was The Rev. Will B. Dunn, a character created by the late Doug Marlette for his Kudzu comic strip. Will was no ordinary preacher, mind you. He was with it, always up to date, in tune with the signs of the times. He also had a way of commenting not only on the signs of the times in general but on organized religion in particular. I miss him.

An example: Will is on his knees praying. He only got on his knees when he was desperate, otherwise he assumed God would take care of him, preacher of the Word of God that he was Will begs: “Lord, I beseech thee…Grant me…” But he is interrupted by a “click, click” “Uh, sure, I can hold” he says. Then with a scowl on his face, he says, “I hate prayer waiting.”

Don’t we all? I mean, when I am at prayer, I want God’s undivided attention. And, more importantly, I want a response right now: no prayer waiting and no answer-prayer waiting for me. But wait I must, must we all. God always hears our prayers. We know that. We always have God’s undivided attention. Whether or not God has our undivided attention when God is trying to get God’s message across to us is another matter, maybe an even more important matter, but always another matter when Item One on our agenda is Prayer Answered. 

God knows our needs even before we ask. God even knows our wants. What God wants, I think, is for us to recognize those needs, distinguish them from our wants, and then reflect on what we will do to help fulfill those needs, Most of the time God allows us to take care of those needs on our own. God simply gives us the grace to recognize the need from the want and the strength to do our part.

But our prayers are always answered. They are not always answered in the manner or the means we would like. But they are answered. God never leaves us hanging forever: for a while, perhaps, but not forever. My suspicion is that the time between making our needs known to God and God’s response is to be used by us to do what we can do to respond to those needs.

When we have done all that we can do, at least our doing our part, God will do God’s part, but not before. When those in real need came to Jesus, they knew they had a need – to see, to walk, to be healed in one way or another. They had done all they could. Now they were putting the rest into God’s, God’s Son’s hands.

Prayer waiting just might be an apt way to describe prayer. We need to wait a while, take time to get in touch with ourselves so that we can wait on God. Maybe one of the reasons why it seems that it takes so long for God to get around to us is that we don’t give God the time to get to us.