With a hand on your hip and the other one on your head

Picture: My desk backdrop at good 'ol Bryan College. I miss it. Sometimes I miss college days and the familiarity of campus and the exercise I got by walking everywhere I went. Today...is not one of those days. I love my husband and I'm lucky to be with him - I love living with him and spending so much of my time with him. He's my BFF and I wouldn't trade that for the comfort of college.

I don't listen to enough old school Wallflowers. I should remedy that immediately.

Yesterday at work it was a SLOW morning. I found myself perusing Failblog and Awkward Family Photos. I couldn't resist posting them gems...

Awkward Family Photos


Failblog

So yesterday I had a superb realization while I was doing some study questions from my Max Lucado book, Fearless. As a little background...for the last couple months I've really been struggling with prayer. Not actually praying, but how to form my prayers, how to approach the Lord...really intimate and intricate things just started making me doubt my prayer life. In November of last year I remember praying for Dan to get a job and I was literally begging to God. God gave Dan a job and it was a horrible experience for him. (That's why his second lay-off was almost a relief.)

That got me thinking...did God answer my prayer because I didn't have faith and didn't approach Him with hopeful, faithful confidence? Did He give me something outside of His will for the sake of teaching me something?...(You must understand...I over-analyze EVERYTHING. Ask Dan...poor guy. So these questions have been picking away at me for a long time.) It's made me nervous to pray for specific things because, what if I ask for them, and God gives them to me because I think it's what's best, but then it turns out to be like Dan's last job experience? Lord knows I don't want that to happen again...

So anyway, one of my study questions called for me to read Mark 14: 32-42. It's about Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, praying to God before the Betrayal. Verses 35-36 read: "Going a little farther, Jesus fell to the ground and prayed that if possible the hour might pass from him. 'Abba, Father,' he said, 'everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what You will.'"

It seems like such a basic principle of the Christian faith, but I've been doubting and searching and praying for an answer to my confusion. I've researched and read about how to pray, studied the Lord's prayer, but none of those things have seemed to put to rest my question of whether it's okay to ask for things...if you don't know if it's God's will.

But here, in Mark 14, Jesus gives me the perfect example. He knows of his imminent death. He knows it's his purpose in life. But yet he asks God "that the hour might pass from him." Even though he knows it has to happen, he still prays that it might not. He graciously lays his fears, worries and requests before the Lord, but then follows with, "Yet not what I will, but what You will."

It's like an outline of prayer for the questions I have. It was a gentle reminder to me that, even though God knows the desires of our hearts, He longs for us to seek Him...to seek His guidance and comfort in times of doubt and worry. God knows already, but He WANTS us to lay our requests at His feet. And not to demand those requests, but graciously place them there with the attitude that, if we don't receive our requests, we trust God's judgment so much more than our own.

It seems to elementary, but as I was reading it was a HUGE eye-opener for me.

Today is our TEG company picnic. I'm heading it up. Here goes nothin'...