When God Gives You Everything You Want

I've prayed some dangerous prayers in my life.

When I was 12, I heard a camp counselor at a church retreat share her testimony that was filled with stories of abuse, addiction, and heartbreak. I thought my testimony is very boring. So I prayed: LORD, I want a story that’s more interesting. For anyone who knows my testimony eight years later, it could fill a book. A long one. When I was 15, I asked God to break my heart for what breaks His, which is a prayer that I haven’t ditched since. Since that day, my heart has been broken over and over again  by the brokenness of our world: broken relationships, broken institutions, broken systems. Broken people. This is why I’m studying social work; I’m essentially asking that my heart continue to be broken on the daily for the rest of my life so that I will continue to want to do something about our broken world. About a month and a half ago, I prayed another dangerous prayer: Restless and feeling useless for two weeks at home, I agonized over feeling like I had no purpose, and continually asked God to just give me something to do. And oh, did He ever answer!

The last five weeks have been the fullest I have ever experienced in my life, and some days I feel like I’m just trying to keep my head above water. My roommates and I joke about how I don’t really live in our room, but it’s pretty true—there are days when I am gone from 9 to 9. In some ways I feel like something’s got to give—I'm averaging 4-5 hours of sleep a night, I've already gotten sick once, I've barely talked to my family since I've been back at school, and there are friends who I go days on end without even seeing (on a campus of just 600 residents, that’s madness). But really, there’s nothing to give up: I'm only taking 16 credit hours, working 7 hours a week, editing the newspaper, and doing a whole lot of required service learning. I love all of these things, and I firmly believe that all of these things serve and honor God.

And really, the truth is that I asked for it. I asked Him to fill my life, to give me some purpose. He’s entrusted me with a lot, apparently. I don’t know about you, but when I ask God for something and He says “Yes!” I’m not about to try to give it back to Him—can you imagine? “Uh, actually God, just kidding! I didn't mean it!”

What I’m trying to remind myself of constantly is that God does not entrust us more than we can handle with Him on our side. 1 Corinthians 10:13 (The Message version, which is growing on me): “No test or temptation that comes your way is beyond the course of what others have had to face. All you need to remember is that God will never let you down; He’ll never let you be pushed past your limit; He’ll always be there to help you come through it.” Or in the humorously cheesy words of a fitting song that I've been listening to lately, God says to us “I'ma let you bend, but I won’t let you break.”

I’m bending, friends! I’m bending past the point at which I would break on my own, but God’s power is made perfect in my weakness. What a reassurance!

Some other reasons why I’m not breaking:

The blessing of three incredibly godly women to come home to every night. ^

Intentional friendships with these ladies (among others not pictured), who it's okay to laugh, cry (more often than I'd like to admit) and just be ridiculous with. 

So here’s what I have to say about all that: when you ask God for something, make sure you really want it. I imagine that God absolutely loves prayers of abandon from an emboldened, passionate heart, but when you say “Send me, Lord,” be sure that you mean it. He has a serious habit of responding with “I was just waiting for you to ask!”

Also, as a side note, I wrote this post last week on a Greyhound bus on my way to an incredible Christian Community Development Association Conference in Minneapolis, but WiFi was super sketch so I couldn't actually post it. More on the conference (and the bus trip...ugh!) coming soon!