God Did You Delete My Email?
My husband and I took a little four-day weekend getaway before a medical event was going to take place. We had a lovely time but the day-to-day items took a back seat for a bit. You know, like checking Emails and such. With traveling and packing and all the to-do with vacations, I hadn’t checked my Email in a couple days. When I got home and set my computer back in place, I opened my Email to find… well, too many to read every… single… one. So, I began deleting the ones I knew were not important. Like advertisements, recipes, things like that. I sat for a bit with my finger poised over the delete key and clicked away. I had a strange sense of feeling a little guilty for just dismissing something that someone had taken time to send me. Now I know they were junk mails and went out in mass formation to countless others. But I couldn’t help thinking how I would feel if I knew someone was just sitting with their finger over that delete key, ready to click when my Email pops up.
Have you ever felt like God has done that to your prayers? Like you’ve sent that prayer up over and over and there is just no response? Do you feel sometimes like God has just hit that delete key on your request? I have. I’ve felt that God just wasn’t hearing me or wasn’t interested or didn’t have time for my insignificant prayer or had more pressing requests to get to. Other people’s circumstances often seemed so much more vital than mine. Someone was very ill, someone had a financial crisis, someone had their child tragically taken from them. You know, real requests. I had prayers like;
Lord lead me in this decision to take on this ministry…
Lord give me someone to witness to today…
Lord help me to be a better wife and mother…
These hardly seemed to measure up. Yet I could end up feeling ignored by God. Yes, I might see these as insignificant, but wasn’t God supposed to care about them anyway? I had times that I didn’t feel like He did. Truth be told, I will probably have them again. Even though I have seen God work in truly miraculous ways in my life, not just once or twice, but multiple times over. I can tend to have a short memory sometimes, I guess. But there is scripture that tells us that God hears our prayers…
1 John 5:14 And this is the confidence that we have toward Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us.
God does hear our prayers. I know that it can feel like you’ve been forgotten in the huge mountain of requests that God hears on a second to second basis, but He does hear you! He does not have a delete key at all. He values your prayers and mine just as much as ones that we can view as more significant than ours. God doesn’t rank them in order of importance or even in order of who asked first. He is not limited on answers. He is not understocked on ways to respond. He hears you as though you are the only one speaking to Him at any given time. That’s His amazing divinity! Imagine that conversation you are having with your best friend just sitting at the table or out on the back deck sipping lemonade and you are confiding in them what has been on your heart. They are attentive and looking at you as you speak every word. They may not have a response for you right then but you know they are hearing you. They might even say, “I wish I knew what to say” and you would probably reply with, “No, I just really needed you to listen”.
Friends, God is never at a loss of what to say or how to respond. But His timing is not our timing. He sees the end result of every situation before we ever bring it to His ears. Trust that the one who already knows the end will answer in just the right timing. I know it’s so incredibly hard to wait when we don’t know the end. But it all comes down to trust. Remember the ways God has shown up in your life before. If you are a knew believer, or are on the fence about some things, look back at your life and recall how certain situations should have turned out very differently. God is in those moments too. Even if you didn’t call on Him right then, He just may have had a different plan for your life and that’s why you are here now, right where you are.
God hears every single prayer that you pray. Keep praying… keep trusting. Gods timing is perfect!
