At my ward's last fast and testimony meeting, one of the members got up and bore his testimony about how he was looking for his keys and how he prayed, and then was able to find them. I didn't think much of it at the time, until I experienced something similar on Friday night.
Earlier in the week I had been thinking about some of my experiences with prayer over the last couple years. I couldn't immediately recall any significant answers directly resulting from prayer. I knew that it was mostly me being short-sighted, but it made me want to have an obvious answer resulting from prayer that I could easily point at and say, see? God is aware of what I'm going through. It was later that day when I would get what I was looking for.
It's funny to me how urgent prayers can be to find a lost object. You never fully appreciate the emergency of that kind of prayer until you actually lose something that you're just so desperate to find. I was just about to head out to go see Unwritten Law on Friday night when I realized that I didn't follow my normal rule of putting my concert tickets into my glove box in my car. And I even remember when I got the ticket in hand that I put it some place different, and thought that it would be a problem come the night of the concert. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. I started tearing everything apart in my frantic search for the ticket to a show that I had been really eager to see. I ran up and down the stairs in my house, looked through my room, and back to my car, only to repeat the process several times before I decided it was time to pray about it. I knelt down, said my prayer, told God how important it was to me to find the ticket, and then not two minutes later I found it. My favorite part was being in such a panic and rush to find the ticket and trying to get out the door because I was already running late, still had to pick up dinner beforehand, and get some cash, but I still remembered to kneel down and say another prayer of thanks. I loved saying that last prayer, because I really couldn't have been more grateful to find that ticket. One last similar experience while I'm at it...
Another thing I kind of think sometimes (even though I know what I'm about to say is not true, but the skeptic/cynic in me always wants to just attribute these kinds of answers to just coincidence) is that the stories about finding something after a simple prayer, is really just due to someone not looking smart enough or not looking long enough. However, I had one experience that gave me an answer, and it was only because I knelt and prayed that I found what I was looking for. I had purchased a gift for a friend. It was something that I had put a lot of thought into and went through some effort to obtain, so it was really important to me to find it to give to my friend. And I had been looking for it for weeks in my house. I looked all over, and in places where I thought would be obvious, and others where I thought it would have no chance of being. I had looked everywhere. Exasperated by my futile efforts, I finally just decided to kneel down and pray for help in my search right at the spot where I was at in the entry way, between the living room and the dining room in my house. I knelt, said a quick prayer, opened my eyes and then I saw it. It was underneath the dining room table in an area that we only use for holidays. Only because of my kneeling position did I have the vantage point of finding the present that I had spent so much time looking for.
It really does just feel so good to know that there is a God in heaven with an infinite number of creations, and children who probably have an infinite number of pleadings, who will still make the effort to answer my prayer, no matter how infinitely small I am, or how seemingly insignificant my request is. I've only really begun to fully appreciate these verses, but Matthew 7:7-11 has become one of my favorite scriptures, and more especially verses 9-11. If we're asking for fishes, He of courses wants to give us fishes and will do so just as soon as He can. Sometimes we just don't realize that when we think we're asking for fishes, we're in fact asking for stones. I'm just so grateful to know that He does hear me and answers me at every chance He can.
2 comments:
So where were the tickets?
They were on his desk... where he keeps his CD stuff. But the craziest and scariest part is that they were under a big snake with fangs also--so that makes it pretty exciting.
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