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| Seriously just found this on Google... This should be my driver's license picture |
So as I said before, I allowed my relationship with God to take a back-burner this past year. I stopped my pursuit of Him to instead seek out my own path (which doesn't work, so don't try it). Mercifully, He gripped my heart sometime at the end of the school year and told me to help with the youth at my church in South Arkansas, and for the first time in a while, I was obedient, not by my own strength, mind you. My sinful nature wanted no part of this, but God was persistent. As the Sundays and Wednesdays of this summer went on, I got to know more and more of the youth group, and steadily the Holy Spirit drew me to certain people and showed me ways in which God wanted to use me. Among the various ways, perhaps the most tangible has been prayer.
Prayer has not always been a very strong presence in my life. I go through phases where I pray like a madwoman, even going so far as to mark an "X" on my thumb to remind myself to pray every time I see it (and let me tell you, you look at your thumb a lot more than you realize). Then I go through times where I treat prayer like a nuisance. I don't want to take the energy to humble myself and pray, and even then, all I can think to pray is that God will help me, and do for me. But Scripture gives beautiful examples time and time again of prayers of pure praise to God, where the prayers are not self-focused, but rather divinely focused, such as King David in 1 Chronicles 29:10-13.
I'm trying to condense this, so please bear with me. A friend recommended a book to me a little over a week ago, called Because We Love Him by Clyde Cranford. I love the way he puts the necessity to pull our strength not from ourselves and our own power, but from the Holy Spirit.
But any discipline apart from the Holy Spirit is self-generated, rooted in pride and unbelief, and 'of no value against fleshly indulgence' (Colossians 2:23). Thus holiness cannot be its result (Cranford, p. 21)
My prayer changed after I read that. Instead of attempting to pull from my own strength, I prayed for the strength to pray as I should, and for the Holy Spirit to guide me in whatever way God saw fit--to remove myself from my focus, and instead aim it wholly on His glory. Do not misunderstand. I am not a pro at this, nor do I claim to be a the pinnacle of my prayer life, but what I am saying is that God took this prayer and completely shifted the way prayer worked in my life. No longer is it merely a way for me to talk to Him, but I'm finally seeing that He uses it to talk to me as well.
Early one morning during camp, I sat down in my dorm, pulled a chair close to the bathroom door so that I could read by the light without waking my roommate, and as I began to pray for focus during my quiet time, I felt a draw to go and ask one of the other girls on the trip if she would like to do a morning devotion with me. Immediately, fear that she would reject the offer or think that I would judge her began to sweep over my mind, but our God is a mighty God, and He pushed me out of my chair and to her door before I could talk myself out. The result? She happily agreed, and with the strength of the Holy Spirit, I was able to share different truths of the gospel and show her how to get into the Word.
A day or so later, while at a mission site, a friend who who was assigned to another group at the same site approached me and confided that she felt as though she was about to have a seizure. Now, I may be a nursing major and all, but it is still terrifying when you know that you may actually have to use what you've had to learn concerning the health of someone else. So I took her to a room upstairs, away from the commotion of the kids at the site. I grabbed our head staffer, and after about five minutes in the room, my friend began to seize. The head staffer left to call the camp's head honcho (I am not sure what his title was...), and I was frozen in this moment of utter helplessness. But, thank GOD for the wonderful gift which is the Holy Spirit living within us! And praise Him for the times when our own sinful nature is stifled and the Spirit of the One True God is able to use us for His glory! I have always been told not to touch someone having a seizure, but I broke a rule. I told my friend, "I don't know if you can hear me right now, and this may feel a little weird if you can, but just trust me for a second..." and I laid one hand on her shoulder and began to lift up a prayer of comfort and healing over her, and within a few minutes, she came out. She later described to me how she heard me praying, and she felt as though God were leading her out of her seizure.
I'm not usually one to be sappy, and I apologize for my how I am giving this event such a lack of justice, but my words fail in the face of the mercy and grace of the Father. Regardless, the power of prayer was made evident time and time again, in so many examples that to type them all out would probably make me hit the limit on a post length, and I am humbled by the continued faithfulness of the Father.
So now we're all back, and it has become my earnest prayer that every one of us will not attempt to ride out the rest of the emotional intoxication which so often accompanies a week at church camp, but that we will draw our strength off of the Lord in order that we may further His kingdom.
