Dangerous Prayers

Do you ever have those nights where you're completely exhausted & you can't wait to go to bed, only to find that once you get there and your head hits the pillow, suddenly you're wide awake & can't seem to shut your mind off?

Yep, I've just had one of those nights!

First, I was annoyed with the fact that I couldn't go to sleep. It was already fairly late, two minutes earlier I had been struggling to keep my eyes open, and now suddenly I can't seem to get my eyes closed!

So what kept me up? Well...

These past few months God has really been taking me on a journey of prayer. What is prayer? How is my "prayer life"? How am I doing at keeping a mindset of prayer? Most of us are fairly familiar with 1 Thessalonians 5:17, "Pray continually." Yeah, well...I wasn't doing all that great with it. Over the years, consistency in my prayer life has been sort of hit and miss.

So, God has been taking me on this journey of amping up my prayer life. The simple solution seems to be, just pray more. But God has really challenged me not so much on how often I pray but simply HOW I pray...what I'm praying for.

The thought that kept my mind turning as I went to go to bed a couple nights ago was the thought of praying dangerous prayers. See, I don't know about you, but when I think about the kind of prayers that I pray, I'm pretty sure God just looks at me and screams out, "Quit praying safe prayers!"

Okay...let me just take you through my thought process that night.

I always thought of "safe" prayers as those prayers we pray that we know God can easily answer. Pretty dumb, right? Hello??? What prayer can't God answer? "Safe" prayers are probably better defined as those prayers that we're confident that even if God chooses not to answer them himself, we can take care of it, so it'll be okay. (Kinda defeats the purpose of even praying them).

I think when it comes to dangerous prayers, we're scared to pray them. Maybe we're afraid of being disappointed if things don't turn out like we hope. But I don't think God designed prayer to be safe. He wants us to dream, to imagine, to take risks, to ask for the impossible and the miraculous. And then He wants us to trust that He can really do it! He wants us to trust that He's got it...and that even if things don't turn our how we expect, He knows what He's doing.

We all talk about things that we want to see happen in our schools, in our workplace, in our family, in our friends, in our youth group, etc. But how many of us are consistently praying to see these things happen?

What are we praying for?
What are we dreaming of?
What "impossible" thing do we want to see happen?