Prayer is a pretty amazing thing.
“He Shall Hear My Voice” by Michael Dudash
The fact that when Jesus died, the veil in the temple was torn, allowing us to enter the Holy of Holies and now we have full access to God is…well, if you think about it, it’s truly audacious of us to request things of our all powerful, all knowing creator. And yet, He wants us to come to Him… it’s incomprehensible really..
I am pretty sure I barely understand prayer, but I would like to share a couple things I’ve learned by telling you about one particular night when one of my most urgent prayers was answered and one of my most consistently prayed prayers was realized.
I didn’t say “answered” for that second prayer because it had been being answered for as long as I had been praying it, I just hadn’t liked the answer. But, that night, I realized at least one of the reasons why God had been answering me the way He was.
The night I’m going to tell you about was also one of the worst nights of my life.
by Jeremy Man
My most consistently prayed prayer was one of vanity. From as early as I can remember I struggled with self-image. I have never been small. Even when I was fit, I was still larger than society had me convinced I should be. I wanted to be tiny, to be a wisp of a thing, the kind of girl who could be lifted into the air and spun around by her boyfriend. Instead, I’ve always been built more like a brick wall.
eating disorder – Sara Prentice
And, no, I didn’t just lay around praying and hoping God would transform my body, I worked hard for it. I honestly worked out almost every day for most of my life since I was in grade school and I’ve always eaten hardly anything. To the extent of ending up with a starvation focused eating disorder. But no matter how much I worked out or how little I ate, I never lost weight, I only ever seemed to gain it.
God could have easily let me lose weight. It wasn’t even like He would have had to give it to me as a gift, I had given up enough and worked hard enough to earn it. He could have even given me a body where I didn’t need to work so hard in the first place. But He didn’t. He kept answering my prayers where I requested a change in body type with a resounding, “No”. And I was consistently just like…but…why not?
You see, the thing is, Romans 8:28 says, “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” God knows what bodies we need for the lives we are going to lead and He will stick to His decisions–even when we are begging Him for something different than what we need–because He knows things we don’t know.
“Trapped- Domestic Violence” by Sherrie Thai
So, fast forward to the night of focus. I was 30 years old and married to my first husband, who as it turned out had a lot of hidden psychological issues, which made him dangerous to me and to everyone else in my life. I’m not going to go into detail about all the build up to this day, other than to say there was no doubt in my mind that we were on the road to him ending my life. We were living in the basement of my mom’s house, planning on buying the house from her. But this night sometime in early October–after a truly terrifying evening the day before–I was finally determined to tell my husband he had to find somewhere else to live and we needed to be separated for a bit while we figured out his mental health.
We were in the garage because that was his space since he liked working on cars. He wasn’t taking what I was saying very well. But, fortunately, in this moment he had decided to try getting me to pity him instead of fear him. I wanted more than anything to find a way to get him to leave the house without things getting violent, because I was worried for my mom who was off in her room, and for my dogs. So, I was comforting him, trying not to escalate things.
I vividly remember sitting on the cement floor with the head of a man, whom I believed would kill me if I took one wrong move, cradled in my lap as he cried and claimed he had nowhere to go. I was at a loss for what to do next. All I could do was pray.
“Dear God, I need your help. I know you hate divorce, but staying with him is no longer just dangerous to me, it's dangerous to everyone else I care about. I need him out of the house, but I want him to have somewhere safe to go. I don’t know how to make that happen. I need You to make it happen.”
And He did.
I had believed keeping things from escalating was the way to go, but God knew something else needed to happen.
We ended up moving to the living room and my mom came out of her room to check on me–because she knew what I was trying to do that night. But, my ex knew having her around would make it harder for him to manipulate me, so he burst into a blind rage and attacked her.
Fortunately, when it comes to fight or flight, I’m a fighter. He only got one punch in before I was able to get between them. I wrestled with him and eventually got him down onto the couch.
My mom panicked and hurried to call 911.
After I had gotten him down onto the couch I heard her on the phone telling the cops that he had me in a headlock and I corrected her, “No, I have him.”
But, I almost hadn’t had him. The difference between me being able to hold him down and him getting free, was fractional.
Break Free Painting by Nicole Troup
I honestly can’t remember most of what happened while I was trying to subdue him. At one point he had even apparently pulled out a huge chunk of my hair, but I don’t really remember that happening. However, I do remember one moment vividly. When I was on top of him on the couch, he almost threw me off of him and I knew that if he did manage to do that, he would grab the nearest weapon and things would get so much worse.
So, I buckled down and made sure the weight of my entire body was on top of him. And in that moment, it clicked, I needed every bit of strength I had, and every single pound of weight I had in order to keep him down. And I literally thought, “Thank God that none of my diets have worked.”
That’s when I realized that God had known that this moment was coming in my life and He knew what kind of body I would need to make it through. Being a tiny wisp of a thing whose boyfriend could twirl her in the air, would not have helped me in the life I, specifically, was going to live.
Betsie ten Boom
Sure, maybe there’s an infinity of other ways that all could’ve played out. But God knew how things would play out. And, as Corrie Ten Boom’s sister Betsie said, ““There are no ‘ifs’ in God’s world. And no places that are safer than other places. The center of His will is our only safety – let us pray that we may always know it.”
The cops ended up arresting my ex husband that night.
That’s how God answered my more urgent prayer, one which I had prayed having no idea how it could possibly get answered. My ex was now no longer at my house and he was also taken somewhere where he would be kept safe.
I know being arrested isn’t ideal, but in the mental state he was in, it was the safest option for him. It was also an outcome I would not have planned myself. I had wanted things to stay as calm as possible, but God had allowed things to escalate. My mom and I had only suffered minor physical injuries, but it was just enough for the cops to have reason to arrest him. God had known what needed to be done for the best possible outcome in that moment and He had threaded the needle, working out His will amongst the mess of our humanity and free will.
Image © Daniel Pape from GoodSalt.com
Sometimes God’s answer to our prayer is “no” and that may be infuriating to us, but we have to remember that He knows things we don’t know. And while we are most likely thinking from a limited worldly perspective, He is seeing things from an all-knowing eternal perspective.
Sometimes we make terrible life choices which get us into horrible situations. But, God is still there, lovingly waiting for us to bring the mess we made into the Holy of Holies and ask Him to fix it.
God is Love Painting by Ladislav Zaborsky
Like I said, I am not an expert on prayer. But, for some reason, God loves us enough to offer us His ear and His help; and there is no doubt in my mind that it is always in our best interest to take Him up on that offer.
This series of blog posts titled, “Holding on to Reason”, is named after Amanda’s favorite C.S. Lewis quote: “Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.”
Click here for more things written or transcribed by Amanda Hovseth.