Not one without the other

I woke up with an anxious heart this morning, not about the usual suspects as in a police lineup, but something I could not quite put my finger on.

And as what takes place most days in my reading God's Word, He prepares me for the day ahead. God hit the nail on the head once again this morning. 

Why am I troubled? I asked God. And then, I read this passage as if highlighted on the page.

And He told them

        a parable,

to the effect that they

ought always to pray

    and not lose heart.

                     Luke 18. 1

Praying and not losing heart

go together hand in hand.

Worry is just a reminder to pray.

When I worry, I travel on the fast lane to despair.  When instead I pray about the very same situation, I am aware of God doing something very different. I am sensitive to His leading and not just my own ideas about it. I see a different way over the impossible mountain, through the miry bog, and across my Red Sea.

When I seek Him first, following Him by even a slender crimson thread through the imperceptible, God brings me not just to an answer, but to a different place and a new intimacy with Him.

I have an amazingly puny scope of what God can do, a toddler's understanding of the workings of God's universe.

When we pray, we hear another Voice in the conversation. And that would be God.

Pray and not lose heart.

God is at work.