What are you doing here, Elijah?

 I had a question posed:

"Looking for advice for praying for things you want God to move to make happen balanced by submitting to His perfect will for my life...I’m torn between being patient trusting in Gods timing or should I be praying for Him to please make this happen. Or both? Feel free to provide general or specific advice. God bless."

 

There is probably never a completely right answer to this kind of query because prayer and our experiences of prayer can be so radically different from person to person. A type of prayer that is fruitful to one person might not work for another. Such is the ways a mysterious God.

However, the best advice I can give is to take some time to listen. I think we often approach prayer as a list of demands like God is a cosmic bellhop. I can't speak for others, but I know when I have approached prayer in that attitude of "Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz..." kind of attitude, I seldom get very far. This probably stems from my own background where where the ghost of John Calvin comes and haunts me in the middle of the night with notions about God's sovereignty and what not , but I always find it more helpful to enter an intentional period of listening for God before I start intentionally asking for a specific thing. 

 

I take time to earnestly listen. That can be incredibly hard for Americans to do. We want action, and we want it now. God does not operate on Western time clocks, much to our own consternation. But I have found God will tend to answer prayer if you earnestly seek Him out first before making requests. There are many different ways of doing this: sit before the Blessed Sacrament, reading a passage of Scripture and meditating on what God might be saying through the text (Lectio Divina), or just, if nothing else, sitting in silence wherever that may be. But whatever the method, just opening with the question: "What do You want in this situation?..." and then just wait and see.

 

Now, it may take time. Sometimes God gives us a Road to Damacus answer, but more often, it is like Elijah in the cave in 1st Kings 19:

 

11 He said, ‘Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.’ Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; 12 and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence. 13 When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. Then there came a voice to him that said, ‘What are you doing here, Elijah?’ 

 

You have to be willing to hear God's voice in the deafening silence and not just in the wind or in the earthquake. Usually when you get to the point of being able to discern that, then the Divine questions like "What are you doing here, Elijah?" come to us, and we see a way to prayer in a productive way to both seek God's will but to bring our desires to God and the two become one and the same.

 

Listen for the silence.