On the other side of that

A dear friend is emerging from a long and rocky place in her life, a tough road where things appeared unnecessarily hard, opportunities unraveled before her, details didn't work out as expected, and most of the time, there was nothing, absolutely nothing, many of us could do but pray.

And we did.  This patchwork group of praying women, not knowing the outcome, not even knowing the next step.  But we prayed.  We prayed a lot.  And God would remind me from time to time, "The prayer of the righteous has great power in its effect." (James 5. 16)

Even in what appears impossible..."there is a gut deep, intuitive refusal to accept the odds or to calculate too closely either the limits of the possible or the sneakiness of grace...[Prayer opens] the one who prays to broader dimensions of reality than he or she may have entertained before.  Once that happens, there can never again be quite an end of it.  Some part of us is taken captive or set free, and that shift changes the world a little...what might be changed in the world beyond us, what might be gracefully released in it by our prayers."  (Guerrillas of Grace:  Prayers for the Battle, Ted Loder)

Would life always be so hard for her?

But this group women kept praying -- praying for others, praying for each other -- knowing that each one of us had seen too much to question God in this. Even in this. It was not that God would not answer, but how.

God was working mightily.  We just couldn't yet see His handiwork in the midst of it, each mysterious stitch, each confusing turn in the road, even in what appeared as dead ends or deepest disappointments.  And even then, "God engineers the circumstances." (Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest)

And suddenly, she emerged on the other side of that canyon, all those "misaligned" details converged -- the way only God can -- turning a desert place into pools of water, a long drought into a grove of enormous deeply rooted trees, God's faithfulness visibly before each one of us.

"...when you least expect it,
you see a crack open
and a different city appears."

          Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino

God always answers, not in our timing, nor in our ways, but always in the unexpected revealing of His Presence and power.  It is not that God "shows up," but He is already here.  We are just catching up to Him, not the other way around.

As I ran through the forest a couple of days ago, overcome by God's beauty and the working of His mighty ways in this woman's life, I thought to myself:  "And if you knew the outcome, would you have worried as much?"

And immediately, God whispered to me:  "And if you did know, would you have prayed as much?"

Prayer is not the least I can do.
It is absolutely the most vital of all.

First response,
            not last resort.