Lord, it’s me again
I love prayer. There are times I pray so much I wonder if God turns down the volume when he hears my voice. Does he say to his Son, well there she is again? It’s your turn this time.
All jokes aside, on most days, I pray all day long off and on. Something will come into my pea sized brain and I have to pray about it, no matter what it is. Sometimes it is the thought of someone I know who is in a crisis. Or sometimes it is someone I have heard about or noticed on a television show. I just have the need to pray.
I have woken up in the middle of the night with thoughts of a person and laid in bed praying. Since I have been this way I have noticed that I am more prone to hear or see what God expects from me. Sometimes I will be praying as I am walking through a store and encounter someone who looks so sad and I will just smile at them. They may stop a minute to notice and then, smile back. I think, maybe my smile helped them realize there really is something for them to smile about after all.
I am more apt to talk to God, in some respects than to say a formal prayer, although I do that as well. But the chatting was how I started to pray when I first received God into my heart and soul, so it is the most natural way for me to do it.
I am curious how others pray. Do they pray the Lord’s Prayer as their way to connect to God? Do they pray the 23rd Psalm? I do both of those on occasions. One wonderful gift I have learned by praying so much is I can shut out all the noise around me, not hear a thing and just talk and listen to my Father as others around me are far from my thoughts. That is such a gift!
Many many times my prayers are for thanks. I thank God for EVERYTHING. Even the bad things, because I know there was a lesson for me to learn. I almost always get it too. I have so much to be thankful for. No matter my past, my present is as good as it can be. Not perfect, but what would I do with perfect? Probably screw it up some way.
I also sometimes pray the children’s prayer, *Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. * I think it might be a bit scary for children, but it is says, just what I want to say.
The other day when I stepped into the shower, and the water drops hit my hair and slid down my face, I began to cry. Thoughts came to my head that have been there before, but for some reason this time the thoughts touched me more than usual. I was thinking how grateful I felt to be able to take a shower. To clean myself of all the things that had touched my body that day. How precious water is.
There are people all over the world who have no water. None to drink and none to clean themselves. It all made me so sad. I contribute as much monetarily as I possibly can when I am able to do so. I try really hard to be a good witness for God although I doubt I am not always successful doing so, but I do try.
I can’t always watch the news when it shows how horrible some people have to live and I wonder why? There are so many who could help but don’t. And I wonder why.
What would it be like to watch your child die a bit, day by day because there was no food to eat or water to drink? While so many have so much.
There are all kinds of filters in this world. Some sweepers have filters. Furnaces have filters. There are water filters. Coffee pots have filters. They even have TV filters, so you can filter out programs you don’t want your children to see.
Some people have built in filters. They can tune out a child singing along with the commercials or making noises of any kind. Some spouses can filter out their mates telling them the trash needs to go out or any other undesirable job that needs to be done.
Because my mind seems to work differently from most other people, I thought of how God is a filter. At least He is for me. After I found God and began to study his word and go to church, I found that there are many things I just don’t think about anymore. Things I use to think about. Not all bad things, even some good things shouldn’t be on a mind every second of the day.
When my mind begins to drift off into places I really don’t want it to be, I think of God and how he wouldn’t want me to go there. When my mouth wants to say unkind things, I think of God and zip it.
Filters are used to clean up. And that is what God does for his children. He helps them get clean of the worldly things and to try and stay that way.
