“I want some Hunter and Nana Rose time. Not Mama. Not Dada. Not [my siblings]. Just Hunter and Nana.” That was the request, apparently made several times and quite insistently, which resulted in my 3-year-old grandson coming to Nana’s for a couple of days. And, boy, did we have fun! Croissants (another forthright request from a little guy who lived his first two and a half years in Europe), and building with blocks, and an expedition to the Children’s Museum, and watching construction equipment, and going on walks to investigate what “the tree guys” were doing to remove fallen trees, and baking together. We packed a lot in!
Photo credit: Rosalyn Otto
As FULL as it made my heart to be with him, perhaps the biggest gift Hunter gave me was a new perspective on another facet of being childlike: asking with unabashed audacity. Too often, I choose not to ask (don’t want to be a bother), or make my requests more “realistic” – tempering my desires based on impressions of others’ willingness or ability to respond, or I ask once, maybe twice, and then move on. Sound familiar? Somewhere along the way we’ve learned (been taught?) not to expect much, not to ask much, and not to hope for much. And sadly, for too many of us, it’s seeped into the way we relate to God.
Recently I chose to take a cue from my grandson. Nine days before I was scheduled to fly out of the country on a ministry trip, and less than two weeks before a visiting missionary couple was planning on having the use of my car, it was towed to a body shop needing a not-insignificant amount of repair. The cause and timing were a “you can’t make this stuff up” situation. What prompted the most distress for me was knowing that others were going to be inconvenienced if my car wasn’t available in eleven days. A claims adjuster told me, “You do know that it’s not realistic to think that your car will be fixed by the end of next week.”
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“I know,” I replied, “but Jesus said ‘ask’ and I’m asking.” And I did. With the same unabashed audacity that my grandson did, yet also with open hands, I asked and kept on asking. I also took steps in faith to do what I could to assure that I’d taken care of everything necessary for my car to be repaired and ready to pick up before the missionaries arrived. Just a few days later I was surprised and delighted to get a call that my car was ready to pick up! That turned out to be an administrative error, so with only two days left before the missionaries were arriving and not knowing what the outcome would be, I left on my ministry trip with my car still in the shop. I continued to ask God for my car to be ready for them to use and had an assurance that – whatever happened – He would take care of both them and me. To my great delight, the day that the missionaries were arriving I received a text overseas that made it clear that my car had been picked up just that day for their use!
Unabashedly audacious asking. We are all familiar with Jesus’ instruction to “ask and it will be given to you” (Luke 11:9). More often than not, the phrase is removed from its larger context. Jesus had just taught His disciples how to pray by introducing what we call “The Lord’s Prayer,” and He followed it up with an intriguing parable about a man who pounds on his neighbor’s door at midnight and asks for some bread to feed unexpected house guests. Jesus concludes:
I tell you, even though he will not get up and give you the bread
because of friendship, yet because of your shameless audacity
he will surely get up and give you as much as you need. (Luke 11:8)
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Something critical gets lost in the translation from Greek to English of “ask and it will be given to you”: in Greek the verb tense is the present active imperative and is understood to mean “ask and keep on asking.” Jesus was instructing His followers to ask repeatedly and persistently. He repeated this theme with His parable about a persistent widow and an unjust judge: she wouldn’t leave the judge alone and he relented in the face of her tenacity. It is not that we need to wear God down with our requests, rather Jesus was highlighting that if a judge who cared neither for the widow or the justice of her cause would ultimately respond to her pleas, how much more our loving Father will respond to His children when we cry out to Him.
So true! … and here’s the part that has had me wrestling with writing this for weeks. Well actually, if we’re honest, it’s something we wrestle with for all our lives. Because Jesus did tell us to “ask and keep on asking,” and our Abba Daddy is our faithful “Father of lights” from whom comes “every good and perfect gift” (James 1:17). And Jesus did say, “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask Him!” (Matthew 7:11) We celebrate answered prayers, and yet none of us has to look far to come up against the prayers that have yet to be answered. Heartfelt prayers about the longings of our hearts and the desperate needs in our lives and the lives of those we love. There are places missing at our tables. Empty arms. Frail minds. Failing bodies. Hearts longing for their person. Unrelenting pain. Drained bank accounts. Dashed hopes, and dreams turned to dust. The unthinkable happens. Or nothing happens. And we find ourselves in moments, and sometimes seemingly unending seasons, in which we neither hear God’s voice nor sense His nearness.
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So what do we do with the apparent incongruity between what we read in Scripture and what we experience? And how do we ask and keep asking with unabashed audacity when it may well mean opening ourselves up to more pain, confusion, and disappointment? As Solomon sagely observed, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick” (Proverbs 13:12). I have no pat answers; I’d venture to suggest that there are no fully satisfying answers this side of heaven. Even the “man after God’s own heart,” who proclaimed, “The eyes of the Lord are on the righteous, and his ears are attentive to their cry;” (Psalm 34:15) also cried out,
How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I wrestle with my thoughts
and day after day have sorrow in my heart? …
Look on me and answer, Lord my God. Psalm 13:1-3
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With David, we can choose to say, “But I trust in your unfailing love…” (Psalm 13:5), that hesed covenant love which is not dependent on our ability to hold onto God but His ability to hold onto us. And we can choose to trust in His good heart towards us. Charles Spurgeon was both a gifted preacher and author, and a man who suffered mightily from sickness and a deep, decades-long depression. With a conviction tested by fire he preached, “… [the Christian] believes [God] to be too wise to err and too good to be unkind; he trusts Him where he cannot trace Him, looks up to Him in the darkest hour, and believes that all is well.” This is not denial or spiritual bypassing but rather a hard-won resolve to believe what we know to be true about who God is and how He works in the world, even when it seems that all the evidence we can see suggests otherwise. So we hold paradox. We ask our God of Hope (Romans 15:13) to live His name. We embrace mystery. This life of faith is steeped in unknowing. We look attentively for His hand, practice noticing small miracles, breathe in grace for the moment, cultivate gratitude, seek out beauty, celebrate goodness, and refuse to reject JOY in the midst of suffering. And we grieve, and express our pain, our confusion, our questions & doubts, longings & deep desires, and our anger to (sometimes at) God. He invites us to move towards Him in lament.
In some seasons I have asked and kept on asking and felt like I was in a starkly empty and deafeningly silent wilderness; in some areas I am experiencing that desolation still. Sometimes I feel like a toddler, pounding her little fists against her daddy’s chest. And then, if I will allow Him to console me, He scoops me up in His arms and I am held in my Father’s embrace. And, though there’s so much I don’t begin to understand, my Father, who delights in me and in giving me good gifts, gives me Himself. He quiets me with His love and He invites me to keep asking with childlike unabashed audacity.
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Written by: Rosalyn Otto