Well here we are 2 months later.
I want to say that the last 2 months have been a specific time that God has taught me about prayer. I started off May by going to a Church planting workshop where I was amazed by the amount of time "the great church planters" prayed. I had decided then that I would begin looking at prayer like running. My wife, at the age of 40 has decided to become a runner. She has done amazingly well. She runs three to four times per week and has worked up to over 4 miles. She even went 8 miles one weekend. She finished 4th in her age group in the Race for the Cure in Tyler. Way to go babe. Anyway, I decide that I would do the same. I would pray longer each day of the week and work my way towards a more peaceful and "listening" relationship with God. Strange, when I first began this I thought that I needed to practice saying more and asking for more intervention. However, the longer I went, the more I realized that I just needed to listen more. What great peace it can be to ask God to come nearer and then to actually feel that happen. It opens your eyes and heart wider so that you can actually see the answer to the parts of prayer where you actually talk.
Well, we began to prepare for our trip to Houston this week by praying. I have been praying for peace and patience so that I did not offend any of the workers at the warehouse. I'm sometimes good at that. So far we're golden. Kristin and her side of the family have been praying diligently that everything we brought would make it on the container. Still waiting on the verdict.
Well I awoke in a frenzy last week because I realized that in my hurried preparation for the "Moving Day Part I" that I had put the certified copies of my diplomas, certification and notarized copies of my medical licenses in the box with the originals and then the movers took it away. I knew I would never find them. However, I needed them because the people in the government offices of Rwanda love certificates, especially if they have a stamp or a seal on them. Kristin and I began to pray that not only would God give us the vision and the discernment to identify the items we really needed and the top "want" items from the endless boxes but that he would make ours eyes able to see the exact box my certificates were in. Getting a work permit is hard to do without certificates and nearly impossible if you cannot prove you are qualified to do the work you're applying to do. And you cannot get the container that the certificates are on if you don't have a work permit. Huge ugly circle!!
Well today as we are rummaging through the warehouse I moved a large box so Kristin could repack it and behind it was a smaller thin box that had a bunch of papers just hanging out perpendicular like a flag. Literally just sticking out!! I pulled them out and they were the notarized copies of my original certificates and diplomas!! As they say in East Texas, I almost fell out!!! The papers had slid around in the box and somehow while in transit the box had been turned on it's side for just a moment then stood back up upon storage and the papers slipped halfway out of the box. I don't need to explain more about that prayer...
The second prayer event today was the container itself. The movers had said the shipping company would deliver the container to the warehouse around 10. By noon it was not there and so we left and bought lunch for the packers. Fortunately there was plenty of wrapping to do and the workers did not have time to be idle. We arrived back from lunch and I asked Kristin to pray for the container and she prayed for God to give us the container in 20 minutes so that we could get done by mid day tomorrow. I am not kidding you when I say that it arrive 20 minutes later on the dot!!
Now I would say that in the past not only was I a prayer that only talked to God, as opposed to listening. I also was a person who believed in generalized answers to prayer rather than specific. I find now that as we draw closer to leaving for Rwanda that God has drawn me closer and, if I can be so bold as to imply what God thinks, has enjoyed our listening time together. It is great to listen to and for God in these last days in the States and I have continued to workout my listening and praying skills and some day I hope I can spend my time only listening. That way I wont have to ask God for things. I'll just live my life doing and seeing what he has already asked me to do.
Please continue to lift us up during the next couple of days as we load our container. Also lift us up as we are down to 6w before we leave for Rwanda.
Dan Rather, CBS anchor, once asked Mother Teresa what she said during her prayers. She answered, "I listen." So Rather turned the question and asked, "Well then, what does God say?"
To that Mother Teresa smiled with confidence and answered, "He listens".
