Pray First

Pray First

I urge you, first of all, to pray for all people. Ask God to help them; intercede on their behalf, and give thanks for them.

1 Timothy 2:1

Mama Farley’s direct confrontation of Abe’s laziness was needed in that situation. But sometimes it is wiser to bite our tongues and pray.

That’s a lesson my mother taught me years ago. It was a rainy Saturday morning when I finally looked at the cluttered bedroom I had shared with my husband. It had been more than a year since his death from brain cancer, but I was only now realizing how crowded the room was with my little bed next to the one he had slept in during his long illness. For months I had found it less traumatic to ignore the larger bed we had shared for more than sixteen years.

But that morning, with the help of our eleven-year-old son, Jay, I tackled the clutter with determination. Soon the phone rang. It was my mother.

“You sound out of breath, honey,” she said. “Did you have to run up the stairs to answer?”

“No. Jay and I were just shoving furniture around,” I said. “I’m rearranging my bedroom and taking down the little bed.”

My mother started to cry.

“Please don’t do that,” I pleaded. “You know I can’t stand it when you cry long-distance.”

Finally she was able to talk. “It’s just that I’m happy the Lord answered my prayer,” she said. “When I was over there last week and helped you fold clothes, I looked at that crowded room and asked the Lord to help you rearrange the room and go back to your old bed. And every morning since then, that’s been my prayer.”

The news startled me, of course, but it also got me to thinking. What if my mother had marched in and said, “You’ve ignored this room long enough. It’s time to get on with your life”?

I’m convinced that approach wouldn’t have worked because my “letting go” would have been the result of her insistence rather than my own readiness. No, a wise woman chose to ask the Lord to move a hurting daughter forward, and he did. May we remember her example when we’re tempted to tell folks what their next step should be. —SANDRA

Lord, you know I pride myself on being straightforward. I like getting to the point. But even as I say that, I’m remembering times when my words were too blunt and I found myself backpedaling to explain my good intentions to the other person or rationalizing to myself my hasty words. Help me to rely more on prayer and less on verbiage.

Anything large enough for a wish to light upon is large enough to have a prayer on. —GEORGE MACDONALD (1924–1905), SCOTTISH NOVELIST AND POET