If you pray for a loving heart, someone hard to love is likely to show up.
If you pray for your children, you might have to make tough decisions to protect them.
If you pray for your career, you could lose your job to be available for the better one.

No guarantees it will be easy.

I don’t know about you, but my prayer life is changing. The Bible says “ask-and-you-
shall-receive,” but there’s a caveat. We’re to ask according to God’s will, so I’ve been taking time to try to figure out what God wants in the first place, then praying. I guess it’s all prayer…

Here’s an example. My dad died about a month ago. What if we had prayed for God to heal him? (We tend to pray that one so readily.) But he was ready to go. He was sick and frail. It wasn’t God’s will to give him an extension. In fact, the healing prayer would have been doing him a disservice.

But that’s sort of an easy one. He’s home in heaven! What about those prayers that are selfish or have a suggested time frame? (“I want patience and I want it RIGHT NOW!”) Or more seriously, “I want this job or that spouse or a Tahiti vacation.” What if God has something better in mind?

Prayer is serious business. God’s best may have a cost. It may take a long time. It may not be what we had in mind.

That being said, the best will exceed our wildest expectations. We’ve got to hold onto that.