David sent this article to me by Andree Seu at World Magazine (6/3/09)
http://online.worldmag.com/2009/06/03/living-in-unfinished-stories/
Seu is writing about a book called A Praying Life by Paul Miller. In the article he summarizes "a few good things God wants for you in the deserts and ambiguity that stretch between asking and receiving." Here are a few excerpts from the list that particularly struck me:
• He wants you to have a chance to get to know him.
• He wants you to have a chance to get to know yourself.
• He wants to expose your idols—and deal with them—in a natural way.
• He wants you to come to the point of surrendering completely.
• He wants you to know what perplexity and the silence of God feel like, so that you can help others who are going through it.
• He wants you to have mad joy at the way He finally answers your prayer, rather than the lesser joy of an answer given too soon.
• He wants you to get to see, when you emerge from the desert, that He was there all along.
• He wants you to have a chance to hold on tight to him in the middle of the story, when you see no light—and then He wants to reward you for that.
• He wants to give you a chance to walk by faith and not by sight, not as a mere slogan or abstract doctrine but as an every-moment dance.
• He wants to give you a chance to learn that praying, as Miller writes, is “inseparable from repenting, serving, managing, waiting,” and not an add-on in your life.
• He wants to give you a chance to reject what seem like answers to prayer on a silver platter that have, as Miller writes, “little tests of integrity” attached to them.
