Mama!!! Mama!!!

Yesterday the topic of the sermon was prayer. The sermon was based on Jesus' parable in Luke about the judge that was petitioned repeatedly by the widow....over and over again until he gave up and gave her justice. Jesus applied this to persistent prayer by saying:

Will not God then secure the rights of his chosen ones who call out to him day and night? Will he be slow to answer them?

At the end of the service the pastor urged us to think of a prayer we had prayed for a long time with seemingly no results....and with tears in his eyes....he told us to persist. There were about five minutes devoted to this prayer time. I prayed for my kids...Beth in particular.

During the sermon, he used a film strip to illustrate why sometimes when we are distraught, flat on our face before the Lord, crying out to him in despair and yet, we feel only silence...with no awareness of his presence....no apparent answer to our prayers....

The clip was from the movie about Ray Charles. It showed him, flat on the floor of their very, very modest home tears, streaming down his face, crying out for his mother to help him. Apparently he he had tripped and fallen on the floor, new to being blind, and he was crying out to his mother for help. His cries were pitiful and wrenched the mother's heart beating in my chest. She was standing nearby, in the kitchen area. She was keenly aware of his every move....his every cry....but stood silently. He wiped the tears away and stood up...feeling around the shack with his hands...coming close to an open fire...a whistling tea kettle. All the while, his mother watched. Flinching when he was near danger....actually starting to move toward him but stopping herself. She watched as he began to use senses other than his sight to identify things....children playing.....a horse drawn wagon passing by the open window....a cricket. He knelt down on his hands and knees and found the cricket. "I heard it," he said. "And I hear you too. You're right over there." And so the point was that when we are crying out to God, thinking he has abandoned us, he really is right there and if we can learn to use our spiritual eyes...to see in a different way, we will find him.

.............for he hath said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.