image from Adventure Travel Network
Driving with Dad up Highway 395, along the imposing eastern face of the Sierra Nevada mountains, seeing their peaks piercing the sky, their almost plumb plummet from the crest to the valley floor, and exposed granite, intrigued me. Yeah, “God created it all,” but the how did more than puzzle—it astounded. Some decades later a good friend, Dick Markano, a UCLA geology grad, led a group from our church into the Sierra backcountry, and an unintended geology lesson emerged with my questioning. That tantalized me, and I yearned to take a night course on basic geology. Yet that desire was too far down the priority list to punch through into action.
Then, almost by chance, on FB I asked if anyone could recommend a geology book, thinking of a geology 101 type. John Prothero’s brother has a Ph.D. in geology and recommended Annals of the Former World, by John McPhee. A mash up of two books, this totaled 696 pages, not counting a four-page Geologic Time Frame. A doctoral level book, covering 165 different eras from 4.56 billion years before the present to 10,000 years before the present. Most of the words I had never heard.
Still, I’m learning. Slowly. And I’m amazed at how this book is expanding my view of God by orders of magnitude. Not a Christian book, but a science book with a number of biblical allusions. So, scattered into Unconventional posts over the next several months will be some of these random discoveries.
But the take off for this post? Be careful of what you ask for. I asked for a basic geology text and got something that at times I cannot understand, yet that basic text wouldn’t have made the impact of McPhee’s. This experience has a spiritual lesson, about our prayer life, and letting God be God in our prayer life.
Why? I remember Hezekiah, “Hezekiah trusted in the LORD, the God of Israel. There was no-one like him among all the kings of Judah, either before him or after him” (2 Kings 18:5-6). Later he became sick, at the point of death, and begged God to recognize his faithfulness and heal him (2 Kings 20:1-6), and God gave him 15 years. Good answer, right? But then he didn’t trust God to deal with neighboring enemies, lied about it, which played a role in the Babylonian Captivity (2 Kings 20:17-18). A righteous man received what he asked for, but it didn’t end well for him.
I’m finding my prayers have become much more generic, “God, may Debby sense your presence during her hospital stay, and do what you alone know is best.” Why? We don’t always know the full consequences of our requests. I’d rather trust in what God recommends.
Kick Starting the Application
Like Hezekiah and me, have you experienced a time that you got what you asked for, and it really wasn’t the right thing for you? What did you learn from that? Will this post change how you pray?