What If He Answers That Prayer With A Yes? Can You Handle It?

I pulled his storybook Bible onto my lap, the spine nearly falling apart. Each page worn and tired, but not giving out on drawing him in night after night. He pulled the book towards himself, “Can I choose the story?”

“Sure.”

He began thumbing through the crinkled pages. “I bet you know which one.”

“Jericho,” I laughed.

“No. One from last night.”

“Oh! Revelation. John’s vision.”

That is the direction he moved. However, he stopped on another story. John still, but John’s preparing the way for Jesus.

These stories I could nearly recite by heart. Lord, let these words penetrate the deepest places of His heart. He lay tucked in tight. I sat as close to him as my body allowed, one hand holding the book in my lap, the other gently caressing his cheeks.

I finished the story, closed the book, prayed with him, kissed his head, and began to move to the door. Our nights have been so routine since birth. As I walked to the door, I hit play on the CD player. He listens to Dave Ramsey’s kids books on cd each night.

“Hey, mom, if you don’t mind could you put a different Junior story in for me?”

“Sure, which one?”

“Can you bring them to me?”

“No, can I just call them out and you choose?”

“Please can you just show them to me? I’m not the best understander.”

My heart squeezed. Tell him, he might not understand the first time. Show him, he understands.

I left the room pondering his words. They continued playing. God is walking me through the showing process of something. How often does He tell me and I don’t understand, but if He shows me, I get it.

Over the last year, I’ve prayed a simple prayer. “God make me love you more. Make my heart yearn for you above anything else.”

While God has spoken His Word to me many times to tell me how to love Him more, He is beginning to show me. Like Andrew, I may not be the best “understander”.

I’m reading A.W Tozer’s The Pursuit of God right now. God is using this book to tell me the things He is currently showing me. What a challenge and comfort.

I’m in a huge transitional stage right now. Through glimpses on Instagram, Facebook, and here on the blog, you see the most beautiful moments. Not because that is only what I want you to see, but simply because these are the places I focus my heart. I want to see God’s goodness.

The part of this transition in homeschooling I’ve been struggling with most is the giving up of what I love and the loss of what once was. The lack of time to write, the turning down of speaking engagements, the loss of quiet reflection, the loss of time to study. In my heart I’ve struggled with moments of feeling a lack of joy that made no sense because I’m walking in God’s Will, I’ve obeyed what He asked, I’m beyond blessed and grateful for the gift of this season. So why this turmoil in my heart?

In Teaching from Rest by Sarah Mackenzie, this line struck me, “This is the first lesson for the christian wife and mother today: to let go of what may once have been – and under other circumstances might now be – a recollected self, and take on, with both hands, the plan of God.”

So much self I must release to Him.

I’m struggling to hear God. Why is it so noisy? I can’t hear well through the static. It feels foreign and frightening. And dark. Yet, I know He is here.

I sat down with Tozer’s book. Sentence by sentence, I began to hear Him speaking. What He spoke to my heart was that He is showing me now rather than simply telling me. We are in a season that He is showing me how to love Him more. And the process begins by removing things from my heart that have taken root which cause me to love them more than Him. Good things even.

In the second chapter of Tozer’s book he shows a perspective I’ve never considered from the story of Abraham. God told Abraham to take his son Isaac and offer him to the Lord (Gen 22:2).

Page 26 “God let the suffering old man go through with it up to the point where He knew there would be no retreat, and then forbade him to lay a hand upon the boy. To the wondering patriarch He now says in effect, “It’s all right, Abraham. I never intended that you should actually slay the lad. I only wanted to remove him from the temple of your heart that I might reign unchallenged there. I wanted to correct the perversion that existed in your love.”

In effect He says to me, “It’s all right, Renee. I only want to remove from the temple of your heart all those things that have taken residence so that I might reign unchallenged there. I want to correct the perversion that exists in your love. I’m answering your prayer to let you love me more.”

Tozer goes on to say about Abraham, “He had everything, but he possessed nothing. There is the spiritual secret.” That’s it!!! The things Abraham had didn’t have him.

I’m mourning what feels like a loss of my gifts and talents. Writing and speaking. I’m grieving because on one hand I feel I don’t have time to use them, on the other when I try to use them I feel they’ve disappeared. Where did the gifts go?

Tozer answered this cry of my heart as well. “We are often hindered from giving up our treasures to the Lord out of fear for their safety.” “Our gifts and talents should also be turned over to Him.”

Have I loved my gifts more than I’ve loved my God? Have I found my identity in my work, my family, my ministry before I’ve found it in my Lord?

Tozer continues on page 30, “And if we are set upon the pursuit of God, He will sooner or later bring us to this test. Abraham’s testing was, at the time, not known to him as such, yet if he had taken some course other than the one he did, the whole history of the Old Testament would have been different.”

“At that testing place there will be no dozen possible choices for us- just one and an alternative – but our whole future will be conditioned by the choice we make.”

I’m at a testing place. I’ve asked Him to make me love Him more. He is doing what I’ve asked. Little by little. He is pulling me out and away from the things I love in efforts to direct my love properly. Those good things He desires for me to have. He just doesn’t want them to have me. When He can show me this through the testing times, I will be possessed by nothing because I will be so madly in love with Him.

Maybe His plan is to answer my prayer to love Him more with a resounding yes. The process to answer that prayer feels highly uncomfortable, painful even. But praise God for His yes.