Engaging God Pt. 2

It troubled me enough that I began to ask for prayer for my attitude within my Bible study group. I realized it was going to take more than my willpower to be able to get through those early months with an infant and not completely alienate my husband and son in the process. Obviously whatever I was doing was NOT getting the job done. I began to pray more often as well, and as a friend of mine eloquently put it, I entered into the first period of my life where I really wrestled with God. Not in a shake-my-fist-at-him way, but in expressing my deep-seeded frustration honestly through prayer, which often went something like this at 2AM: “Why does this have to be so difficult? What is the purpose? Why, after months of being uncomfortable at the end of pregnancy, enduring the pain and exhaustion of labor and delivery, do moms THEN have to go through months of sleep deprivation? Why? I don’t get it, God, I really don’t. I can usually see the good in most situations, but I am stumped about the good in this one.” I had finally hit a struggle in my life that I couldn’t make better on my own just by sheer willpower.

This questioning went on for many nights over the course of about a month, but slowly something else began to happen as well. Instead of just throwing out a bunch of questions at God, I also began to ask Him for help. A lot. I didn’t get an immediate answer to those questions, nor did Anna suddenly become the world’s greatest sleeper, but what I did get was a lesson in what it means to engage with God, to be honest with Him, and to ask Him for help. While I can’t say this cured my bad attitude overnight, I found myself praying more frequently. Not long, eloquently worded prayers like you might hear in a church service, but something to the effect of “God, it’s one of those mornings. No part of me wants to be pleasant for my family and every part of me wants to be crabby. I need your help to make it through until nap time.” And that was it. The more often I did it, the more often it spilled over into prayer for other areas of struggle in my life, and also into prayers of thankfulness for the things that were going right. I began to seek out what God wanted for me every time I had a question.

Merriam-Webster has a number of definitions for the word engage: to bind by a pledge to marry, to induce to participate, to begin and carry on an enterprise or activity, to give attention to something, and also, interestingly enough, to enter into conflict or battle. My wrestling with God showed me He doesn’t need my biblical knowledge or my checklist of see-all-the-good-things-I -did-this-week…He needs me to be humble in spirit enough to be engaged with Him, and that I NEED to be engaged with Him or my attitude just stinks.

Whatever this “engagement” looks like—sometimes worship, sometimes group prayer, sometimes individual prayer in the shower because it’s one of the few times I can be alone—the point is that it’s two-sided now-I feel as though I’m more actively seeking Him.

To close-I love the way our Worship Pastor at WoodsEdge opens up our worship time. Before we begin, he always says something along the lines of “You can sit, you can stand, you can kneel. You can raise your hands, you can clap, you can remain motionless. You can sit back and take it all in, you can pray or you can sing. But here’s the important thing: whatever you do, don’t miss an opportunity to engage with the God who loves you.” Nothing has shown me the power of this privilege-engaging with God-more than being a mom.