A person who desperately needs God’s help doesn’t mess around with formalities. His prayers are simple and aggressive, variations on the same three word prayer, “God help me!” It is a richly theological prayer and worthy of more insights than I can give it here. We briefly considered the first word, “God” in last week’s post, now let’s consider the second word.
The second word, and the essential core of a destitute’s prayer is “Help”. It is, after all, what we really need. Nothing superficial here. A truly needy person doesn’t have time to tiptoe. “Help!”
A man once accosted me outside the public library and made a strange request: “My kids are hungry and we’ve run out. Do you have a loaf of bread?”
I’ve been asked for cash countless times. If he’d asked for cash to buy bread, then he very well might have wanted the money for something else. But a man who asks for bread wants bread. He needs.
It reminds me of Christ’s words in Matthew 7:9-10. “Which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent?” The answer? Well, no decent dad would ever do that. Correct. “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!”
God knows the extent of our need. Does that mean that God gives his children candy all the time? No. Does his answer to this destitute’s prayer always look like the salvation we hoped for? No. But when we ask for fish, he will not give us a snake. In my case, God brought a night into my soul to dispel the darkness that was suffocating me.
To someone observing from the outside, it may have looked like God was giving me a snake instead of fish. I felt that way at first, but now I know that the night in my soul was the cure for my darkness. Does he answer that way for every cry? No. Just as suffering seems especially tailored for each of us, so his help is fitted particularly for each of us.
In any case, God’s rescue and whatever form it takes, is in line with his final vision for us. He is about the daily task of forming us and he will bring us to completion.
That’s no lounge chair doctrine. If I am a pot (and I am), and if God is a potter spinning me on his wheel right now (and he is), then I should expect trouble. Those who have done any pottery know that the process is a violent one. Early on, the clay must be literally pounded. Spinning the pot is no gentle task either.
C.S. Lewis famously noted that an artist making a sketch for his three year old nephew takes little pains about it, content to whip something up. “But over the great picture of his life–the work which he loves, though in a different fashion, as intensely as a man loves a woman or a mother a child–he will take endless trouble–and would, doubtless, thereby give endless trouble to the picture if it were sentient.”
God is an artist. You are his masterpiece. God causes trouble, varying degrees of dis-ease, not only to shape and cure you of various ills, but also to bring you to himself. The dis-ease, the suffering, is an opportunity for you to depend completely upon the one whom you need anyways.
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Ben, I am very intrigued by the idea of suffering, as well as help, being tailored to our specific needs. I just interviewed a man who spent 37 years in prison. He said, similarly to what you have said, that God used that time to make him who he is.