Breathe.
If you are a Christian, this might not be the first post you are reading about prayer. And there is a good reason for that. Understanding how to communicate with a power that’s the Creator of your heartbeat, is literally vital.
As a kid, I had no problems at all to believe that this superpower was granted to me. Looking back, my smaller version seems to me like a confident warrior of faith. I remember discussions with our adult neighbour about the existence of God when I was only six years old. Putting my favourite stuffed dog at a chair every night, praying to God it would be alive the next morning. Celebrating funerals for every little creature that chose to take his last breath in our garden with the confidence, that it's just sleeping.
Is God able? This question never came to my mind. By now, you might guess, that this changed. And it did. Humans have an insane power to limit what God wants to do for them. I had to learn that the hard way, when I prayed but the humans around me continued to hurt. What do you do when the answer to your prayer is silence? When the situation seems to get worse every time you have been on your knees? I began searching for reasons. Maybe I prayed the wrong way. Maybe God is not able. Or maybe His promises are valid for everyone but me.
I chose the last option. By that choice I turned into exactly that person, I have been thinking of being abandoned by God. No return ticket for me. And it felt like the same time I stopped praying, I stopped breathing.
But do you know what I love about God? He is able. If I believe it or not and He knows how to reach our hearts again, because He made them. For me personally it is impossible to walk along the roaring ocean or to hear the wind rustling in a mighty tree, or to be engulfed by the silence of a sunrise without feeling His presence: nature speaks to my soul about God in a language that I understand, it reminds me of His power.
Therefore, He brought me to a place which made me listen again. I literally took the wings of the morning and flew to the uttermost parts of the sea – New Zealand.
Only four weeks later I found what I believed to be lost. There, at a farm I received the answers in a small red bible, that my mother had silently placed in my bag. I had everything I needed to finally receive answers to all my lonely prayers. Do you know the relief of breaking the surface and taking your first breath after being under water for too long? That’s how it felt.
You and me, we both don’t live in the environment that God has planned for us. He wants us to be in paradise with Him. Communicating face to face. But sin creates something that feels like being under water. You cannot breathe. And there is only one solution: crash to the surface!
That’s what prayer is to me. Filling my lungs with His spirit, my heart with His joy and my mind with His love. Getting ready to dive down again and help others to the surface. There are no chains holding us down anymore, thanks to my best friend and Saviour Jesus Christ.
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