Prayers with “oxymoron” answers

This morning in southwest Michigan, we awoke to an ongoing snowstorm and 8 inches of snow. Before the sun was up, my next door neighbors had turned on festive mini-lights above their deck, and the combination of snow and leaves falling together around them was magical. In my 68 years, I don’t ever remember such heavy snow coming so early in November.

As I cautiously made my way to our Tuesday prayer group, I couldn’t resist stopping repeatedly to take pictures of colorful leaves weighed down with snow, an impressive oxymoron. Was it a wintery-fall or a fallish-winter?

It isn’t unusual to encounter life-circumstances that don’t go together, a plus and a minus that are completely incompatible. This is especially true when we’ve asked God to be involved, and no matter how we try, we can never predict what he’s going to do.

Let’s say a poor man asks the Lord to strengthen his dependency on him, and then God answers by giving him great wealth. The man wasn’t asking for riches and is surprised (and delighted), but if ever there is a big-league test for personal dependency on God, that’s it.

Or maybe a wife prays for the Lord to influence her workaholic husband not to spend so much time at the office, and God answers by putting him in a hospital bed where he has plenty of time to think about his priorities.

Or a mother agonizes over her child’s drinking and asks God to take him off that slippery slope, but God allows him to drift into alcoholism. Years later, he finds Jesus Christ through Alcoholics Anonymous, and his life is revolutionized.

It’s important to ask ourselves if we can accept God’s interesting (and sometimes agonizing) answers to our requests. So often we rail against him for allowing things to get worse. And then, months (or years) down the road, he opens our understanding to the magnitude of change he had in mind. We learn his purposes for a life are always greater in scope than anything we prayed for.

But even more significant than accepting the incongruous connections between our prayers and God’s answers is the underlying principle that we must never pray with a mindset of telling God what to do. We can’t “put in an order” and expect him to follow our instructions.

Instead, after we’ve poured out our requests, if oxymoronic things start happening we should excitedly realize, “It’s God!” After all, the biggest oxymoron of all time was when he saved the whole world by crushing his only Son.

So, after we’ve prayed and nothing seems to fit together right, we should stop to recognize God and marvel at his work. In a small way it’s like stopping to take pictures of brightly colored leaves bowed low under the weight of an untimely snow.