Praying…

For a long time I’ve had a running dialogue going with God.

But like a scared, rejected, and untrusting foster kid… I sat on Gods front steps for an even longer time.

As I began to trust Him the Holy Spirit showed me that even though I finally came inside Gods house… I still had a suitcase packed and tucked under my bed… just in case.

This year I finally, with intent, entered “prayer training” with the Lord.

I started to write down my discussions with God and leaving enough space to come back and fill in with how he answered any specific prayers.

The first thing I noticed was how “childish” my first thoughts were about what I thought I wanted from God.

Those thoughts prompted some good discussions with God about how I feel about my mental and emotional maturity versus my physical maturity.

Even when I had my serious health incident in 2024, when I found myself answering an emergency room doctor in the voice of a child, I said, “Why am I talking like a child?”

I believe now, after those discussions with God, that that health incident and the vision I received, were actually gifts.

It took a little while for me to see it but there it was.

So I worked through my current maturity issue using primal responses we have, that we can feel in our gut.

The classic, “freeze, flight, or fight” responses.

I placed them in that order according to the ages they represent to me.

“Freeze” happens when we are small children and bad things happen to us… we are too small to “flight or fight” so we freeze, problem being our brains and emotions “freeze in time” and the way we react in the world stems from this experience.

“Flight” can happen when we “get big enough” to physically run away, it starts to happen a lot at ages 11 and 12 and on into our teenage years… we learn how to run away physically and mentally… but not emotionally, emotionally we still “freeze”.

“Fight” is interesting because as an adult I have learned that 99.9% of any elevated encounters do not turn physically violent, but in those encounters the people I encountered were still in “freeze mode” concerning their emotional maturity.

They only had one response, one way of interacting, just yelling and screaming, and when I gave them no response they stormed out because they had nothing else they could do.

God allowed me to “grow” through that exercise and when we got through it my “prayer training” took a turn.

I don’t know what is going to happen in the next ten minutes so how do I know the concern I have right now will even be relevant in the next 15 minutes?

So I had to ask myself, “Do you really believe God is in charge? If He is what does He want?”

I know, thanks to God, that I will die someday, and that His son is coming to get me.

I’m good.

So analytically I don’t need to pray for me, or what I THINK I WANT… I need to pray for someone else… starting with my wife.

One of my prayers for my wife was that we could keep “her cushion” in our bank account, I went to my bank to close out a loan I paid off.

And on “a whim” stopped and talked with a loan agent… and walked out with a new loan, that did not effect our current money situation, everything stayed the same and we ended up with “a double cushion”… nice!

So I went back to my “prayer training” journal and wrote it down.

I think that’s a mature approach to prayer.

I’m with God.

I’m good.

Maybe He’s keeping me here for you; my wife; my kids; the absolute stranger/lady that I helped the other day.

Maybe He has me here to Encourage, Equip & Engage?!?!

Praying…