NEO, I have been told all my life to wait on the Lord for a good man. It sounds good but it hasn’t worked out for me yet. Is it because I don’t have faith? -SANDRA
MY REPLY: I have heard many women say and listened as they have been told to “wait on tha lawd” for a good man. But I think there is a lot of confusion as to what that really means. We are drawn to Bible stories of prophets and angels and people being told where to go and when. But that was then and this is now. Plus not everything man interprets as God is really God even if it is written in the book you call the Bible. God is not in the matchmaking business. God does not specifically choose to raise up or send a man to you. As much as it makes people feel good to want to believe that, you need to understand that God is not a respecter of persons no more than the rain or snow chooses not to fall on you when you forget your umbrella or your coat.
Just because other beings may interfere or intervene in a situation, does not mean that they were specifically sent by the God of creation but more often by the god of our limited understanding. So am I saying that God has no influence in the circumstances of our lives? No. But just like the soil cradles a seed, the rain waters it, the sun bathes it, the earth provides it sanctuary, and gravity keeps it to the ground- all those rules of physics were created such that if we CHOOSE to cultivate a garden under those conditions, the seed will grow and bring forth fruit. Those rules don’t change just because we pray and believe God suddenly changes his mind specifically for us on things we cause to happen or just happen as a part of nature.
In order to understand how things change or how we get the desires of our heart while at the same time understanding that God is not in the business of placing one person above another, there are two scriptures I want you to examine. James wrote (5:16) “The prayer of a righteous minded person is powerful in what it can achieve.” And Jesus said (Mathew 17:20) “I tell you the truth, if you had faith even as small as a mustard seed, you could say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it would move. Nothing would be impossible.”
We have a habit of thinking big when we really should be thinking small. When we figure out how the little things work is when we accomplish big things. The microchip led to the mobile phone you now carry that has replaced dozens of machines. Splitting the atom has brought new forms of energy that powers our homes without the need to chop down trees. Our capacity to discover how things work is only limited by the bad things that we do. But we have within ourselves the ability to understand light, gravity, the atom and do things today that would seem like magic a thousand years ago. And there are beings older than us who know even more.
Prayer is a human process of putting our spirits in the right frame of mind to attract the answers and unleash the abilities needed to accomplish our goals. And that is something made possible to us all. So it isn’t that God specifically answers your prayer and not someone else’s, it is that between you and others praying together on your behalf, you open a window to wisdom that empowers you to recognize a solution. It is then up to you to embrace it whether it is a man, a job, or any other situation in life. Remember whatsoever you you bind on earth is bound in heaven and vise-versa. All that means is that the rules of possibility were set at the point of creation and that faith only scratches the surface of what we all can accomplish. All a relationship takes is two right minded people choosing to walk together in faith. And waiting to do that is our choice, not God’s. -NEO