The answer man!

I was overjoyed this morning. I went for a morning run at the track. I was totally alone- I was there just under an hour and I never even saw another runner. I was listening to U2, "Pride" and at one point it made perfect sense to stop in the middle of the field and shout along with the chorus "In the naaaaaaaaaaaaaaame of love!" And I realized that the heart of my joy today was that I felt overwhelmingly blessed by God. I felt that God really loved me and had answered my prayers. And I really loved him. He answered my deepest prayers.

I'm the answer man. You want prayer answered? Ask me to pray. My prayers get answered! Oh yeah, I'm the answer man. God must really be amused by how stupid I am sometimes. But he has a way of bringing me back to Earth, too. As I continued running, praising God for answering my prayers and feeling so blessed I might have been glowing, my smug arrogance was blasted to smithereens by a thought: what about the guy who didn't get the promotion? And what about the parents whose baby wasn't born healthy? Does God love them any less? How are they supposed to make sense of this- that I was blessed this week and they were not. Certainly, it has nothing to do with my actions...I'm quite sure I didn't "earn" the answers to my prayers.

I wrestled with those ideas for the duration of the run. I felt happy and blessed, but also humbled and profoundly aware that not everyone gets their prayers answered all the time (including me). And the conclusion I came to manifested in the form of a question: "Would you be this happy, this grateful, and this willing to praise God if you didn't get your way? Is your praise and adoration of God contingent upon a steady inflow of blessings and the absence of hardship?" And the answer wasn't pretty.

I felt guilty as I started my devotions. I have been reading through the Message Bible. It's a nice change of pace from the NIV- I find it helps old scriptures to come to life again when I read the different translation. Today I picked up right where I left off and this is what I read:

"By entering through faith into what God has always wanted to do for us-- set us right by him, make us fit for him-- we have it all together with God because of our Master Jesus. And that's not all: We throw open our doors to God and discover at the same moment that he has already thrown open his door to us. We find ourselves standing where we always hoped we might stand-- out in the wide open spaces of God's grace and glory, standing tall and shouting our praise.

There's more to come: We continue to shout our praise even when we're hemmed in with troubles, because we know how troubles can develop passionate patience in us, and how that patience in turn forges the tempered steel of virtue, keeping us alert for whatever God will do next. In alert expectancy such as this, we're never left feeling short-changed. Quite the contrary-- we can't round up enough containers to hold everything God generously pours into our lives through the Holy Spirit."

Pretty incredible. It was as if that passage (Romans 5: 1-5) was written just for me, just today. There is some amazing stuff in the bible. It never ceases to amaze me how applicable the principles are, even today. Now, all I have to do is remember this moment when I feel "hemmed in."