Kicking and Screaming, Part 2

Today I felt like God was smacking me “upside the head.” Lovingly, of course.

Two friends and I started prayer-walking this morning. We decided to pray silently as we walked, which was a good thing, since I don’t think I could have prayed out loud without getting choked up. Every time I tried to pray what I thought we should, God jerked me around. It seemed as though He was saying, “No, honey, that’s not what you need to be praying about. I want you to pray about your own heart.”

Then, in devotions—I’m blessed that we have devotions every morning at work—we sang Have Thine Own Way and I Surrender All. And God kept asking me, “Why won’t you trust Me, honey?”

See, I have been praying for something specific to happen, something that I thought was the only way a certain situation would improve. But I realized this morning that God is big enough to change the situation in an even better way than I envisioned. He wants me—instead of telling Him what to do—to just trust Him.

As if that wasn’t enough to convince me, I picked up a devotional book around lunchtime. I turned “by chance” to a chapter about trusting God. Once again, I realized that I haven’t been trusting Him to take care of the difficult situation.

Tonight, I found these verses in Nehemiah 18:

“So turn from your evil ways, each one of you, and reform your ways and your actions.' But they will reply, ‘It's no use. We will continue with our own plans; each of us will follow the stubbornness of his evil heart’ ” (verses 11-12).

It’s pretty clear that God wants me to change, instead of praying for other circumstances to change. My heart is stubborn, but God is pulling me—kicking and screaming as I am—back toward Him. Now I just have to trust Him to help me change, because I sure can’t do it on my own.