When I pray, which lately has become a little more frequent, yet not as frequent as it used to be, I remember Moses praying in Exodus 32:11-14:
11 But Moses implored the LORD his God and said, “O LORD, why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you have brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? 12 Why should the Egyptians say, ‘With evil intent did he bring them out, to kill them in the mountains and to consume them from the face of the earth’? Turn from your burning anger and relent from this disaster against your people. 13 Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, to whom you swore by your own self, and said to them, ‘I will multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have promised I will give to your offspring, and they shall inherit it forever.’” 14 And the LORD relented from the disaster that he had spoken of bringing on his people.
He basically says, "if you kill the Israelites, everybody else will wonder what kind of God you are. They'll see you make promises you don't intend to keep and that your intentions are evil and you don't want that, right? Show them instead that you're merciful and gracious and love us. And that's how they'll see you."
And my reference for prayer, even if the usual suggestion is Jesus' teaching of the Lord's prayer later on.
If God answers prayers to glorify Himself, then the way we should pray should reflect that also. Instead of asking God to heal a sick child because she's suffering and in pain (which without a doubt God hates), I'll ask God to glorify Himself through His mercy and healing. I'll say to God, "Here's your chance to make yourself known. If you do this, they'll have no choice but to respond."
Of course, the majority of the time, I'm wrong. I'll ask God to do the impossible for somebody who doesn't believe, and God will do the impossible and I'll be filled with this sort of unmatchable awe and my friend, upon whom the results of my prayer are bestowed, rejects it all. Sure, they might be grateful for the healing or whatever else it was, but they still won't thank God for it. And so feeling a little humbled, I return to God and apologize for my arrogant certainty and my unrelenting idealism.
And other times, they do know it and God is glorified and it makes prayer all the more amazing and full.
But then there are the selfish things, which I don't understand how people can ask of God. "Please, God, give me this promotion." Or "Please God, let my kid win his softball game." I don't get those. At best, God will ignore you and teach you some more profound lesson you totally deserve to learn. At worst, He'll give you everything you want and you'll eventually stop looking to Him for things.
And I know part of it is my skewed perception, as one friend put it, that everything good is undeserved and the bad things are just my fate and so I never dared to ask for anything, except maybe a little bit of guidance and healing.
But lately, I've found myself asking for more. After getting a glimpse of what life would be like if I had a soulmate, I started to ask God for more. But I know He won't do it if it's just for me, just a selfish ask, and if by chance, He does, I don't want such a selfish prayer answered either. It's too risky. And then as I thought of reasons why God should listen to me on this one, I realized it might not be nearly as selfish a prayer as it felt originally. So instead, I found myself asking God differently: "Glorify Yourself in me too," I said. "Take this girl with a beat up, broken past who can't be loved and let her show the world what love can be like in spite of that brokenness. Because to let me live the end of this life too broken to love anymore... It just makes me a horrible example of Your mercy and grace and healing. Heal me while everybody's watching. Restore me so they can know how good You are."
Maybe it's still selfish. And maybe it's not meant to be. But I have to believe that God will heal me. I have to because it hurts too much otherwise.
So maybe it's selfish, but at the same time, I find myself more afraid of Him healing me and me losing this need to press into Him to get through the suffery bits, which is actually even more selfish because not only am I not glorifying God to those around me because everything relating to Him is in suffering, but also because I'm isolating myself and I'm not loving people the way I used to. It's not good for anybody.
On the other hand, if I pray for everybody and never pray for me, I'm not loving one of God's children properly. And I'm also not trusting that God loves me as much as anybody else either.
I just really hope that people don't look at my life for all its brokenness and use it as a reason to dissociate from God. I hope they don't say things like, "See? She believed in God and where did it get her?" Because you know, even if my life ends tomorrow, what it got me was God. I did get to feel loved for the first time in my life. And that's not nothing. That's everything. I just wish I could make it more obvious, even if I should know by now that even if Jesus Himself stood in front of some people, they'd still say He didn't exist.
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