Hearts That Make God Smile?

Excerpt from Prayer, Does It Make Any Difference? By Philip Yancey: “…I have come to see prayer as a privilege, not a duty. Like all good things, prayer requires some discipline. Yet I believe that life with God should seem more like friendship than duty. Prayer includes moments of ecstasy and also dullness, mindless distraction and acute concentration, flashes of joy and bouts of irritation. In other words, prayer has features in common with all relationships that matter. If prayer stands as the place where God and human beings meet, then I must learn about prayer. Most of my struggles in the Christian life circle around the same two themes: why God doesn’t act the way we want God to, and why I don’t act the way God wants me to. Prayer is the precise point where those themes converge.”

This passage already strikes several chords with me… more than I should try to explain on one post.

Yesterday some of the ladies and I who pray together on Thursday mornings swapped some of our “war stories,” if you will. How sometimes you’re just in the groove and prayer flows (is that a mixed metaphor?), while at other times every potential distraction pulls you away or even turns into a major irritation.

What is striking to me as I look back on my short stint in God’s Army of Prayer is that the effectiveness of prayer is not to be measured by how it feels. When I'd hit a prayer groove, I had always expected to see huge things happen. But that’s not always the case; in fact, some of the most amazing answers have come when I felt I was getting nowhere. Which isn’t to say God doesn’t answer struggle-free prayers. But no longer will I quit just because it doesn’t “feel” like it’s “doing anything.”

I’ve got to remember that God doesn’t look at things the way I do. “God sees not as man sees, for man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.” (1 Samuel 16:7b) This was what the Lord said to Samuel regarding King-to-be David, the “man after God’s own heart.” Could it be that when one prays-on-through the dullness, the mindless distraction, the bouts of irritation, and/or whatever else gets thrown at us, God looks at that one's heart and smiles?