by Drummer Girl

Created on: March 20, 2007   Last Updated: May 11, 2007

Prayer is like planting a garden. Bear with me here, and you'll see what I mean. Imagine that you somehow know absolutely nothing about how plants grow. Someone gives you a bunch of seeds and says "you put them in the ground, cover them with dirt and then you'll have a wonderful garden". So, you plant your seeds. Nothing happens, and the next day nothing happens and then on the third day you conclude that this was all just a joke.

But we all know that once you plant the seeds you have to water them, and then wait. We know that beneath the surface of the soil, the seeds are swelling with water, the first little root appears below the ground and later the shoot that will become stem and leaves pokes up through the dirt. Some are pretty fast, like radishes, but if you want tomatoes or peppers, you have to wait quite awhile. Even after the plant begins to grow you still have to wait for the flowers, the little green fruit and finally the larger ripe ones. But, if after a few days you just give up and walk away and don't water or weed, you'll usually end up with nothing.

Prayer is something like that. We pray and sometimes we get the answer we were looking for right away. Often we don't, and then conclude that prayer doesn't work, God doesn't exist, or God's answer is 'no'. We give up, and by doing so we negate the whole thing. We stop taking care of the garden, so to speak, not realizing that at the spiritual level, where we can't see it, things are beginning to line up to bring us what we asked for. There are a lot of places in the Bible tell us we need to believe when we pray, not desperately wish for things, but believe. One verse is Matthew chapter 21 verse 22 (Jesus is speaking): "And whatever things you ask in prayer, believing, you will receive." Caroline Myss says that, after we pray we should believe that everything that happens from then on is part of the answer, even if it doesn't seem like it. Just like it doesn't seem like the bare patch of earth will ever be a garden.

Some things take longer to come about. Sometimes you are praying about something that involves another person, and God won't over-ride what the other person wants. Sometimes we wouldn't be able to handle the full-out answer to our prayer. We need more inner strength, healing or attitude adjustment before we can deal with what we asked for. And sometimes what we get is better than what we wanted in the first place.

The message I want to convey is this: don't give up. Don't walk away from the garden, but give it time to grow.

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