Many years of working in IT has taught me this about engineers: they love a good problem, and they hate being told “how” to solve it. I mean that IS what they get paid the big bucks for, yeah?
Ok, let’s do a bit of a shift: imagine for a moment that you are the Architect of all creation, the Designer of the cosmos, the Bringer of all life. So, you know, God.
Now imagine that Suzy Q. comes to you and says, “God, please give me this two bedroom condo in downtown Metropolis that’s close to my workplace.” And boy is she insistent. I mean, day and night, it’s all she ever talks about.
What Suzy doesn’t know is that the condo may have rooftop pool access and a 5 minute commute, but it also has mold issues. Plus, Juan, the man of her dreams is about to propose and by the end of the year, she’ll be getting married and moving into his place. Not only that, she’ll have found a better paying job 10 miles down the road.
You try to tell her that it’s a bad idea, but she’s so emotionally attached to the idea that she won’t listen. So, you allow her to have what she wants. Now she’ll be feeling poorly while trying to start a new job, plan a wedding, and sell a condo.
“Sometimes you use prayer to try to control outcomes.”
-Jesus, to me, being His usual incisive self.
Figuring out the best way to fix a problem is sometimes referred to as entering the “solution space,” and it’s a place that most engineers guard jealously. In this we can probably take a note from our brainy friends: just as human experts hate being told how to do their job, God doesn’t really like it when we try to limit Him with our prayers.
The End of the Matter
In the end prayer is a conversation: interactive, dynamic, and personal. It varies from day to day with needs, deepens with relationship, and broadens with maturity. It can be as big as eternity or as tiny as a mustard seed of hope that we can barely put into words. But no matter what form it takes, one thing that Jesus always insisted on was the need for faith; a loving confidence that God hears, cares, and is able to help with perfect wisdom and power.
So…Maybe we should give God a little solution space. Maybe we should just bring Him our needs, tell Him our hopes, lay it all out before Him and let Him address them in the way that He knows is best. Maybe we should trust that He knows all about our situation and genuinely wants to give us His best, a far better thing than we can imagine.
Matthew 6:8, Matthew 6:26, Ephesians 3:20, Luke 12:32, Hebrews 11:6