Living for the Very First Time!

I received this sweet award from my friend, Christy Rose, a few days ago and I thought it would be perfect to blog about on the day that I share what I learned at church yesterday. This award is for those who are "eager to share their love for Jesus with others." That's one of the things I love about reading Christy's blog.

I know I was supposed to give away the Honest Scrap Award and this award too, but I just can't do it. I can't pick just a few people, because I love you all. I believe that each one of you was sent to me to teach me something, or to help me look at things a different way, or just to be a great friend. You are each special to me, so please consider yourselves recipients of this award and feel free to post it on your blog!

So, yesterday at church we started a 3 week series on Prayer. We talked about some of the reasons people don't pray more. Maybe they aren't sure how to pray. They might get bored or distracted while praying. (I had to laugh at that one because he was talking about how you start to pray and then that leads you to thinking about something else and before you know it you're planning your day or thinking about something you forgot to do and then you're like, oh yeah....I was praying....I do that all the time). Sometimes, we might think our requests are too small for God or we aren't sure our prayers will even make a difference.

We talked about how there is no right or wrong way to pray! Prayer is simply communicating with God. It's okay if you pray differently than everyone else. You don't have to sound like you're talking in the King's English in order to pray! I was laughing out loud, because one of my pet peeves is when Pastors all of a sudden will sound like they're from medieval times when they begin to pray. It's so fake, in my opinion, to start talking like you don't normally talk just to pray (you know, like thou hast, and thy and thee.....words that we just don't use today). Our Pastor was cracking me up because he said, if my daughters came up to me and started all of a sudden talking to me like that I would wonder what in the world was going on with them! LOL!! We should talk to God with gut-level honesty. We should just be ourselves, after all, he knows if we are just trying to "appear" spiritual or if we are putting on a show.

When we pray, we can talk about everything that matters to us with God. Prayer is a way to walk with God, to do life with Him, to acknowledge that He's always there. 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18 says we should pray continually. We don't have to sit down at a certain time of the day to pray. We can do it throughout the day, as we go about our day. Our Pastor used the example of Twitter. We can pray short, simple prayers about what's on our mind, just like tweets, to God. I thought that was a neat way to think about it.

Of course, no relationship is much fun if every conversation is only one-sided. When we pray for something, we then have to listen for God's response. Sometimes he will answer us in a gentle whisper, sometimes he will answer us with a message from a song, and sometimes he will send a certain person to us. I can't tell you how many times I've woken up with a song on my mind that answered my prayer from the night before, or how many times I've read a blog post that was a direct answer to the question I had asked him recently, etc. If you don't believe that God exists, or you just aren't sure if He's real, just be real with Him and tell Him so. Tell Him to show you! It won't be a coincidence when all of a sudden, at every turn, you start seeing a million things to show you that He's there.

God will lead the path to where you should be going if you are obedient. Sometimes it may not be what you had planned. Sometimes He may not change our circumstance like we pray for, but He might change US so that we see things differently.

This song describes perfectly what a relationship with Christ is like. I turned the radio on earlier and I told Lily, "This is a good song!" and she said, "It makes you smile!!" That it does, baby girl.......that it does!