The other morning, Susan and I were having an, uh, disagreement. On a scale of 1 to 10, it was only a 2 or 3… but my daughter was listening in.
After our “conversation” had died down, my daughter walked into the kitchen, pointed her finger at my chest, and said, “You need to learn to communicate better.”
She’s eight.
It’s frustrating to sit at the feet of my eight year old daughter and learn age-old wisdom like that. But of course, she’s right.
I do need to learn to communicate better.
And it’s not just with Susan. I need to learn to communicate better with God. Too often, I hold things in instead of openly spilling them out to him; I stubbornly persist with my silly agendas instead of bowing my will to his plans. And far, far too often, I simply don’t believe that what I ask for in prayer is really going to happen.
There’s some consolation in the fact that I’m not alone. There was an entire church that grappled with the same problem. They needed to learn to communicate better. They were united, focused, and earnest in their prayers; but they didn’t really believe God would do anything significant about it.
Remarkably, he did anyway (see Acts 12). So I guess God isn’t waiting for our communication to improve before he acts; he’ll take our best efforts and do miracles. That’s what the next 40 days are going to be about at The Journey.
I’m going to preach about it tomorrow. If you’re close, come; if you’re distant you can listen in here beginning Sunday evening: http://sermon.net/yourjourney (you can also subscribe here: http://yourjourney.typepad.com/).
We’re going to learn to communicate better – but God isn’t going to wait until we’ve got it nailed down to work in our lives.
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