mercy

Our church has an awesome prayer chain. This week alone it generated an out-pouring of petitions on behalf of numerous people in need. Additionally, I get a number of additional requests every week from friends and family for prayers. 

It isn't logical, I know. But before you jump on me, the illogic isn't in thinking prayer will do any good. Prayer always works. But there's no reason on earth that God should listen. Think about it: someone disrespects you, takes your stuff without asking and breaks it, makes life choices he knows you hate, ignores you for days at a time, and then shows up with his hand out. Would you give him the time of day?

Thank God, for whatever illogical reason, that isn't how prayer works. No matter how unfaithful I've been, God hears me and responds. Daniel put it this way, in one of his prayers in Daniel  9:18-19: "We do not make requests of you because we are righteous, but because of your great mercy. Lord, listen! Lord, forgive!"

It's all about mercy, which has its roots in God's infallible, unending, never-changing love for me. Mercy means I don't get what I deserve. God doesn't treat me the way I treat him.

So I can, in my fear, run back to God's sheltering wings and he protects me. I can, in my need, turn back to my Heavenly Father and he gives me what will help me most. I can, in my sorrow or fear or anger or disgust or loneliness, vent and rail and purge my emotions, and God listens and comforts. I can talk out the foulest of my sins and He never, ever stops loving me. In his mercy, he has claimed me forever as one of his, my debts to him covered forever by the blood-price paid on the cross. So he's there at any time to listen and to help.

I guess, in the end, the most illogical thing of all is that, now that I've experienced so many times how wonderfully prayer does work, I don't do more of it. I still try it on my own first. There's no logic at all to that.