Face To Face Prayer In A Text Messaging WorldНамуна

Praying with Honesty

Text Message from Friend: Hey, how are you?

Your reply typed while focusing through tears and pain: Fine.  

Sometimes the subject matter just doesn’t lend itself to a text-message conversation. Intense feelings can sometimes only be honestly dealt with face to face. 

Have you ever answered “fine” when you were anything but fine? Perhaps we think we are protecting whoever we are speaking to by not inviting them into our pain, but the truth is, when we aren’t completely honest, we end up building a brick in a wall we don’t want between us. 

David offered up some pretty honest prayers. In Psalm 42:9 he asks, “God, my rock, why have you forgotten me?” 

Jesus cried out in honesty as He encountered His humanness and asked God, “why have You forsaken me?” 

God knows what you are feeling without you saying it, but trusting God with your hurts builds a deeper relationship. Honesty opens the door for God to comfort you and reassure you that He is going to use it all for good. 

I love David’s Psalms when he starts out brutally honest with God, speaking about his troubled bones or his distressed soul, and ends with the realization that God is his Rescuer, in spite of it all. What seems to be a sudden change of heart is actually the receiving of God’s comfort. He’s not suddenly writing about how good God is merely to talk himself into believing it. Rather, God had met him in his pain and revealed the depth of His love and the hopeful promise of deliverance.