Prayer Box
How hard does the enemy have to work to discourage you from doing what God has asked you to do?
Have you ever thought about how little it takes to truly discourage you and make you question if “God really said” or “you’re really supposed to” do something?
Let me share one of many such examples from my life.
I’ll start by reminding you that I have never LITERALLY audibly heard the voice of God. The conversations I have with Him are as real to me as if you and I were sitting down talking over a cup of tea, but He doesn’t speak audibly to me. Very few people actually have heard an audible voice when they hear from God.
When I’m asked what God sounds like, I tell them to close their eyes and imagine themselves saying their name. What they hear when they imagine themselves saying their own name, that’s what God sounds like to me. I encourage them to do it again, pointing out that this is also what the enemy sounds like when he makes suggestions. So how do you know if it’s God, your own thoughts or the devil?
I have learned several things:
When God speaks, He never contradicts the Bible.
When God leads, He makes a suggestion and gives you free will to choose to obey or not.
When it’s the enemy, even if he is pushing you to do something “good,” he leads with urgency and fear. God will never lead with fear.
For Christmas this past year, my daughter, knowing I love God and I love prayer, bought me a prayer card box at the thrift store. I thought it was a very sweet and thoughtful gift. Immediately, in my mind, I knew where this box was to be placed.
There is a BEAUTIFUL park in Germantown called Daniel’s Memorial Peace Park where I have been placing little trinkets for about a year now hoping to encourage people who visit to get in the Bible to see what God says about them. When they get a trinket, it takes them to this page on the website.
So when I got this prayer card box, I saw myself hanging it in the little cabin and knew that’s where God wanted me to put it. I went out on December 29th to buy a little lock and key for the box and intended to put it out there the next time I visited.
In January while looking at ministry finances, I began questioning God’s intentions to fund this ministry without my help. I began questioning the quiet way He had me set in place for people to support the ministry financially. Without consciously SAYING I didn’t trust God, I began thinking about that little lock I had purchased for $9.34. Did God REALLY want me to hang that little prayer box in that little cabin or was that my idea?
I began considering making a QR code that would take you to an online form to ask for prayer. I went into my office, sat the lock out on my desk and placed the receipt on top of it with the intention of returning it on Monday morning on my way to work. Returning to the living room to finish watching a show with my husband, I started getting caught up on emails on my phone. There was a familiar email…we had received a donation through the website. I opened the email and my heart stopped beating for a second, “Is this for real?”
We had received an anonymous donation that was more than all previous donations combined and plenty to cover the upcoming expenses I had been so concerned about funding. In my heart I heard the LORD whisper, “Are you willing to put the prayer box out now?”
Friend, imagine the sinking feeling in my heart as I considered how I was willing to completely ignore His prompting to put that prayer box out over a $9.34 lock. It’s not that I couldn’t afford to just pay for that lock, but the LORD had let me know that this ministry was not to financially cost my family anything and that HE would provide for every need. It has taken considerable restraint on my part to not secretly funnel family funds into the ministry in sneaky little ways. It’s not something I can really explain, but it is something God was VERY clear with me about, so I have been on a journey learning how to trust HIS provision rather than my own.
This was a very profound lesson for me that let me know how very much more I had to go in learning to unconditionally trust not only God’s provision but His timing.
It has been about three months since I put that prayer box out there and on Sunday a friend and I went out to the peace park to take more trinkets and check the prayer box. There were 55 prayer cards in there. The prayer requests ranged from “My husband has stage 4 cancer”, to “I’m grieving the loss of my cat,” to “my moms stomach became paralyzed and she needs a feeding tube or she will die,” to “I’m 5 months sober, pray for strength” Fifty-five men and women who had the opportunity to ask for prayer because I was willing to put a $9.34 lock on a box. Fifty-five prayers cards have been prayed over now and I’m sure there will be many more to come.
Simple acts of obedience become complicated when we get our souls (our mind, will and emotions) tangled up in what we KNOW God has CLEARLY asked us to do.
LORD, what you ask of us is simple when we simply obey. Help us as we consciously CHOOSE to tuck our souls away and obey.
“And God is able to make all grace abound toward you, that you, always having all sufficiency in all things, may have an abundance for every good work.” 2 Corinthians 9:8