Praise God!

When I became a real Bible student, I adapted prayer in my daily life. Over the years, prayer took many forms, but it morphed into sometimes just a bunch of requests with a brief thank you. One day I was taking a long walk with a person very close to me. It was a perfect evening for walking and this person had only recently become close to God. He had spent many years as an agnostic, not actually denying God’s existence, just unsure, perhaps needing some kind of evidence. Recent events, that were not easily explainable, caused him to believe that God had to have lent a hand.He asked me if I’d like to pray with him and I said yes. He led the prayer and it was long, maybe 15 minutes while we walked, and the entire time he thanked God, just a continuous series of thank yous…

Thank You that I can share this time with Darlene…thank you for this beautiful evening…thank you for my family…thank you for all the blessings we have…I can’t really remember it all, but what I remember is that he never asked for anything. He just said thank you. From that day forward I restructured how I spoke to God, keeping in mind that no matter how much I wanted to ask for, even if it was totally an unselfish request, thanking God had to be the main focus of my prayers. At the time I had probably been a Bible student and Christian for maybe 30 years, but I learned something from just a recent convert. Just goes to show that inspiration and revelation can sometimes come from an unexpected source. I needed that reminder of how much God had given me and how grateful I should be.