The Power of Praying in Specifics
“God, please help me to find a job.”
“God, please bring relief and healing.”
“God, I pray that I would find a husband.”
If our God is a personal God, then our prayers – our very conversations with God – should be nothing less than specific. But for many of us, we tend to keep our prayers quick and vague. While I’ll agree that it’s better than nothing, our relationships with God could be so much richer!
Think about it. When you’re in conversation with a close friend or family member, you dive in deep. You talk about your aspirations, your specific trials, your emotional wellbeing and what it would take to bring you to a healthier state. You want them to know the details so they can not only share in carrying your burdens, but also so they might provide an answer.
Our conversations with God should be no different, and yet, many of us (myself included) hold a bit of fear, with a hint of laziness, when it comes down to getting more specific and asking better questions of God.
What if I’m too specific and that’s not how He wants to answer?
What if I’m disappointed?
What if I prayed the wrong question?
God yearns to be in relationship with us. He wants us to live a life of abundance and asks us to bring the desires of our hearts to his attention (granted, He knows far before we even open our mouths). The fruit of asking in specifics is that we then start noticing the ways in which we receive in specifics, which is an incredible testament that our God is indeed the living God.
Allow me to indulge you with a few examples:
Before my job interview for a content writer position with my then would-be employer, I had to edit an article as a test of my skillsets. As I began, I prayed that I would see grammar errors and mistakes that no other applicants had seen. To my surprise, during the interview, the interviewer said, “you caught things in that article that no one else was catching!” And while I maintained my composure during the interview, in my mind, my jaw was hitting the floor. This man just echoed the very words I’d prayed the night previously – surely, God was in that place.
As I scrolled Facebook this afternoon, I saw a post from a woman with two young children. She told a quick story how since becoming a mother of two, she’d been missing out on being more active due in part to the lack of a specific brand of stroller. In her heart, she lamented this and the very next day, she received a text message from a friend who was offering her that very brand of stroller – for free! Surely, God was in that place!
Praying in specifics keeps us on our toes and alerts us to ways in which God is actively moving. The answers to specific prayers strengthen the heart and soul to great measures, reminding us that yes, God does care about us – even the tiny, silly things. And while no, we won’t always get answers the way we think we should or requested, this practice is stretching our relationship with God.
Challenge your prayers to the next level and watch and see how God delivers.