Praying for renters for our duplex makes me feel a little sheepish.
You see, everywhere you look, someone is enduring considerable financial hardship. All it takes is to remember the suffering of the people of Haiti to bring this concept home. In comparison to losing everything to one of the worst natural disasters in modern time, our situation where we've gone without a renter for a few weeks isn't nearly as dire. In essence, I buy into the lie that there are "big" or "small" prayer requests. So, I approach God like He's an overworked and spread-thin sovereignty of limited resources, and I realize that even as I pray for the thing I so desperately want, I've already made it a foregone conclusion that I'll be disappointed. Because I don't want to put God in a box where He must answer my requests in the affirmative in order for me to put my faith in Him. (Which is why I get so weird when someone tells me that God can heal Ellie; I know that He can, but I don't require it of Him. But I've yet to fully understand myself on this point, so I'll leave it for another time.)
But I think it gets to the bigger issues of whether I feel worthy for His blessings and whether I believe He answers the prayers of some unassuming somebody like myself.
Over the last couple of years, I've done some study on what the Bible teaches on prayer. More than once, I've landed in Luke 18 at the Parable of the Persistent Widow. For me, it is always a message of comfort and an encouragement to continue praying. If even the unjust judge will yield to the repeated requests for justice, how much more will Our Father who is perfectly just honor our persistence?
Luke 18
The Parable of the Persistent Widow
1Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up. 2He said: "In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared about men.3And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, 'Grant me justice against my adversary.'
4"For some time he refused. But finally he said to himself, 'Even though I don't fear God or care about men, 5yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won't eventually wear me out with her coming!' "
6And the Lord said, "Listen to what the unjust judge says. 7And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? 8I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?"♦
