Two Different Prayers

I don’t want to go backward. I want to go forward. I just want to feel the way I used to feel. It took me longer than it should have to realize those were two different prayers.

I hadn’t realized I was asking God to move me forward while still measuring every good day against who I used to be.

Paul had a thorn. He never says what it was, only that he asked three times for God to remove it. Three times. That’s not how you pray when something doesn’t matter to you. I used to read that story and stop at what God said back. “My grace is sufficient for you.” This time I stayed longer on what Paul was actually asking for. He wasn’t asking for grace. He was asking for the thorn to disappear.

God didn’t do that. Instead, He gave Paul enough to keep going, which is not the same thing as what he prayed for, and I don’t think Paul walked away from that pretending it was.

Floyd Mayweather built one of the greatest boxing careers of all time with hands that were also one of his greatest limitations. They kept breaking. He couldn’t change his hands, so he changed the way he fought. He stopped trying to overpower opponents and became one of the greatest defensive boxers the sport has ever seen. It wasn’t the career he would have planned. It became the one he’s remembered for.

I keep thinking about how none of these are stories about getting back to normal. They’re stories about discovering that forward doesn’t always look the way we imagined it would.

Maybe God has been moving me forward all along. I just kept expecting forward to feel like going back.