You have not because you ask not

Not that long ago I was talking with a friend and telling them about how my prayer had for a while been that God make me understand that my life exists solely on His grace. I told them how I prayed that my heart would find contentment in Him alone, and that I could truly hold everything I have with an open hand and honestly sing the words of the song we like in church "You can have all this world, just give me Jesus.".


Their reaction surprised me. Eyes wide, they drew back slightly. "Don't you know what you are praying? That is not something I'd be so quick to say to God unless you really mean it. That's not an easy prayer."


It's not an easy prayer, especially when "everything I have" entails my four younger siblings, all of whom I'd die for in a second. My dad, who will probably always be my hero. My mom, who is so drawn onto my heart I'm not sure where I end and she begins. My dream of being a doctor, which to me represents fulfilling a call, not a job. My ability to go to school at LeTourneau. My close friends. My ability to see. The ability to walk. Cognizance. Mental capacity.


I feel a trend in the way we approach our prayer life. We are conservative, and we are afraid. We are afraid to ask God for all of Himself. Not fearful of excessive grace, but of excessive loss. We easily move God's blessings into the category of entitlements, and soon we are unhappy and begin to use the phrase "it's not fair".


The sharp pang of loss teaches in a very Pavlov's dog sort of way. If we play it safe and risk little, we never lose more than we are comfortable going without. If we never ask God to make our lives real, we don't have to deal with the horrible hurt of masks being torn away and standing shamefaced while the light reveals what we really are. So we stay comfortable. We stay safe. We don't gain much, but we don't lose much either, and life feels satisfactorily content. Radical is synonymous with loss, and great gain is most likely great pain. Leave us alone. Better to never have loved than to know the loneliness of absence.


Not so with God. He chose to experience the gamut that comes with creating people with free will. He understood that the only way things can be real is there being an option for them to be fake. The only way to grab hold of what life should be like is to let go of what it wasn't meant to be like, but what we have settled for. If we continue to approach our lives and our Savior this way, I'm afraid we're risking the loss of something that hurts more than losing the blessings we've claimed ownership over.




We're going to lose ourselves. We're going to miss our chance. We're going to stay on the shelf in our plastic covering and watch God write His story with other people who were not more equipped, only more willing. Cowardice is thinly veiled in our soft prayers that echo off heaven's ceiling when we talk at God about how we hope He keeps us safe and wish He'd fix our problems.