"WARNING:

All words spoken in prayer will be taken as sincere, even if they're not."

I've started to think God should just include that warning every time we pray.

I often think of prayer as a comforting thing.  You can talk to the infinite holy God and he listens!  You can pour out your anguish to an ever-listening ear who can do something about it!  But I forget all too soon who exactly he is.  He's the God who sent his only Son to die on a cross for rubbish like me.  He's the God who consumed Nadab and Abihu with holy fire for getting a little fancy with the incense.  He's the God who commanded Hosea to marry a prostitute.  He's not confinable, but he reigns supreme over everything, and his ways are radical.  His ways are certainly not my ways, they're higher and much more humble.

I'm sitting here looking at my life right now and scratching my head,  How on earth did I get here?  And why am I even sticking around?  I think the answer has everything to do with that prayer warning I mentioned above.

You see, more than a few times over the years, I've read an amazing story, or sung an inspiring song, and thought, "Why doesn't God seem to my as close as he did to the person who lived or wrote this?"  And then I'd get the brilliant idea to pray and ask God to make him the most precious thing to me, whatever the cost.  I just forgot to mention in my prayer the fine print, excluding everything I hold dear from that "whatever the cost" phrase.  And I didn't pray this just once, I prayed at many, many times.  I had no clue how heavy those words would weigh into my life later.  Even if I didn't mean them all, God took them oh-so seriously (and the scary thing is I'm only nineteen).

Without getting into too many of the grubby details, my life's pretty tough right now, with no signs of getting easier within a bearable amount of time.  Put on paper, my trials look smaller than they feel.  Living at work, having no social life whatsoever, working over fifty hours a week, having just about zero fellowship, feeling so, so, so, alone, attempting to raise kids coming from difficult backgrounds with people who have different parenting principles.  The list goes on.  Put in such definable terms, I find it easy to imagine grace when I separate these circumstances from myself. The person going through all this just has to cast themself on Christ and boom! joy will abound and they will conquer all the giants staring them in the face.  It's just so easy, trials are no big deal.  Trust God, it'll all be better!

But when it comes to living every day under all of these weights, grace looks a lot different from the imagined flowing cheerfulness and strength.  The grace given looks a lot less like Superman and a lot more like the ragged dogs that wander around down here looking for trash to eat.  It's a grace that allows me to see my utter helplessness in all of this and pushes me to cry out to God to make it through the next five minutes.  It's a grace that dries my many, many tears and helps me get back up on my feet to receive the next blow.  And I honestly don't think that last sentence is an understatement, because it feels like as soon as I've come to a place of faith to face the next day under this set of circumstances, a few more complications are added.

For a while, I was, quite frankly, mad at God for this.  My life's already hard.  Why did he have to add another thing?  And then another and another?  I was only timidly sure that I could live with all of those burdens, and here's a new and even heavier one!  But thinking about it a little more, I'm a little more at peace with this pattern.  I can't help but think that God is actually delaying the added trials until I've wrestled and found his grace for the original ones.  I am most definitely constantly breaking, but I've not yet broken.  It's a beautiful balance of pain and grace.  Just enough misery that I am so aware of my need for God and so full of worship for his sustenance, but never enough hardship that I collapse.  My hands are increasingly raised in praise, but never thrown up in despair.

Every day, I'm living those prayers I prayed.

"Jesus, be my all!"

"Fashion in me the same character found in Christ!"

"Make me a servant for your glory!"

The words sounded so sweet, so noble; the realities are so bittersweet, so lowly.  But the grace given.  Ahhh, it's so much richer, so much deeper than anything my comfort-saturated soul could have invented through imagination.

So, when you pray, offer it all, even though you don't really mean it.  God will take you at your word and when your prayers are half-forgotten, he'll begin to answer them.  If you're anything like me, you'll watch with initial horror as your treasures are tugged from your tight fist, but you'll rejoice as they're replaced with unspeakable beauty and unending grace.

And don't say I didn't warn you.

NOTE:  I wrote this sometime last week, when things in my life were really hard.  And then, after I wrote it, they, no surprise, got even harder.  And I just believe it's worth saying that, even as troubles pile miles high in your life, if your hope is in Christ, the sweetness of fellowship you will gain with him through trials is worth all of the painful sacrifices. Though my life is harder than it was when I wrote these words, God's grace is still sweeter.  Sweeter than my trials, sweeter than the comforts lost.