Conversing with God

A woman with whom I had a casual professional association for a few years once told me, “You’ve had a charmed life.” Her conclusion came early in our relationship, and I wasn’t exactly sure what she meant by it. In time, I learned a great deal about her personally, and she had been through a lot of hardship. She’d experienced failed marriages, alienation from her grown children, financial struggles, and more. What I also learned was she thought I’d only experienced opportunity and success since I hadn’t endured the same challenges that defined her life. She thought my joy was from being unaffected.  She had no idea of my story, which includes an array of painful life events, just like everyone else. The difference was she did not know Jesus. 

This is a very poignant differentiator. The correction people assert to the expression, “God will never give you more than you can handle,” is that, in fact, “We do experience more than we can handle alone; that is why we need God.” This is true if we want to survive life’s storms intact and on the right course. We know what it is like to feel that only by God’s strength have we overcome certain experiences. When we are desperate, we call out to Him for sustainment, as we should. With God proving Himself time and again, we are set up by our own experiences to not just depend on God but to choose a life of reliance on God. Even so, life is happening, and we find ourselves feeling needy or in want or worried or uncertain. Our prayer life is our foolproof means of navigating through such intrusive emotions, and God has made big promises that conversation with Him is sufficient. 

Conversation with God is not one-sided. It is not either of us praying up words into Heaven alone or God simply pouring out His will in the written word. This conversation does not resemble an email exchange with a colleague that is merely transactional. This is a relationship, just as if you and your heavenly Father sat down alongside each other in rocking chairs on a country porch, knowing the heart of the other. While quietly rocking, you make conversation according to what seems timely and pertinent. That porch engagement deepens the strength of the relationship, and as the sun sets, you both know the two of you just experienced something genuine that imprints the memory of the time spent together. With or without all the words, there is the knowing, and you let the evening settle, aware you were richer for it. 

While we are busy doing life, perhaps we make it a priority to thank God before meals or use our communion meditation pause in Church service to contemplate the sacrifice and our need for it. While the commitment is sincere, our prayers are incomplete if we treat them like a deposit at the bank or dropping a letter in the mail. God moves on our prayers, so we should expect each prayer to have consequence. Some results are evident to us, other results appear months or years later, and some results are affected out of our line of sight entirely. 

We tend to sometimes think of God’s work in our prayer life as linear. It isn’t. We aren’t to present our prayers and petitions and expect that next, it is God’s move. Again, that is not relational. Let us return to the porch in our rockers with the sun setting and anticipate that God has something on His mind in response to our words. He may offer clarity in the moment. He may choose silence at the time, but that is a form of communication unto itself. It prompts us to examine more closely what it is we are asking for or petitioning. It presents opportunity for us to search Him, to know Him more intimately. This naturally transforms our desires to mold to His. “Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope” (Romans 5:3-4, NIV used throughout). There is most often a process; a journey; a reckoning; a surrender. In the midst of it is joy, testimony, love, and hope! 

Who is this sovereign Lord who makes such bold assurances to our prayers? “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened” (Matthew 7:7-8). 

He is the Almighty. “Sovereign Lord, you have made the heavens and the earth by your great power and outstretched arm. Nothing is too hard for you” (Jeremiah 32:17). Isaiah 40:28 proclaims: “Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom” (NIV). The heavenly realms declare, “You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they were created and have their being” (Revelation 4:11). The angel said to Mary in Luke 1:37, “No word from God will ever fail.” 

He is the All-knowing. “Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable His judgments, and His paths beyond tracing out!” (Romans 11:33). “Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of Him to whom we must give account” (Hebrews 4:13). The psalmist writes, “Great is our Lord and mighty in power; His understanding has no limit” (Psalm 147:5). 

He is Righteous. King David proclaimed the God of our prayers, “is righteous; He loves justice. The upright will see His face” (Psalm 11:7). Paul said God presented Jesus as the atoning sacrifice through faith in His blood to demonstrate His righteousness (Romans 3:25), and Moses described Him as “the Rock, His work is perfect; all His ways are just” (Deuteronomy 32:4). 

The God of our prayers is love. Absolutely nothing in all creation can separate us from His love (Romans 8:38-39), and His love is everlasting (Jeremiah 31:3). As we sit in a rocker on a country porch knowing the God we pray to, the God who has promised He will answer and He will answer with perfect timing and course, is the All-knowing, the Almighty, the Righteous. We converse with the one about whom Zephaniah said, “The Lord your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves.” Our prayers are well in hand with such a One as He. Because I have known Jesus, my life has not been “charmed,” as the former acquaintance suggested, but it has been blessed and guided indescribably because of the intimate, porch-sitting nature of conversation with the One who loves me most. We should each sit with friends, especially those who need to know Jesus, and share the unique yet clear ways God has conversed with us about our prayers. Here’s one of mine. 

While I lived in many places through my early childhood, the place I identify as my hometown is New Holland, Ohio. My father was the minister there for several years, beginning when I was nine years old. I recently travelled through New Holland and stopped at the cemetery so that I could leave flowers at the grave of Prudence Maxey. I never knew her. She lived from 1915 to 1930, but when I was a kid in the 1970s, I found her grave and was touched a girl barely older than me had died so young. I took care of her grave from that time forward, planting lily of the valley, wiping the stone clean, and clearing weeds. This continued until I went to college in 1982. My freshman year, I found myself the only female in the missions program, so I researched the first female to graduate from my alma mater and become a missionary. Her name was Isabel Dittamore. I made a photocopy of her picture and hung it in my dorm room. It was some time later (1984) that I was speaking with the school librarian one day when he mentioned his dad had been the minister in New Holland many years earlier. He then said his family had a tragedy while living there. His sister had been hit by a truck and died. I genuinely lost my breath as our librarian’s name was Victor Maxey. I could only whisper, “Was her name Prudence?” Yes. It was. When I told him I had taken care of her grave for years, he wept. Then I learned he had another sister who went to the mission field, Isabel Maxey Dittamore, Prudie’s big sister. This was God! I eventually got to meet Isabel and all of Prudence’s living siblings a few years later, a very emotional experience for us all.  

When I looked back into my journal from my early teen years and studied what I was praying for, it was for peace and a pure heart. My parents were getting divorced and it was a tumultuous time. You can imagine when it’s happening to the preacher’s family, so many additional people feel entitled to get involved. I worked at the local restaurant and was fully exposed to townspeople’s unfiltered questions. It was rugged. My ongoing dedication to Prudence and her gravesite, without question, was ministering to my heart. It turns out it was answering my prayers as well. What I didn’t know was the very way God was cultivating a pure heart in me was also meant to be the balm to the hearts of Prudence’s family. That He brought forth in His time. God and I have spent many occasions rocking on the porch praising His fine work in this experience. It has directly affected the person I am today. “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened” (Matthew 7:7). Make good conversation today. He’s waiting on the porch.