What if I could reframe how you see the faithfulness of God? We know He is faithful but it is easy to forget that when we go through hard things. As Spurgeon put it “We are too prone to engrave our trials in marble and write our blessings in sand.”
That is a picture of one of my prayer journals. For the last ten years or so I’ve been recording prayer requests in them and dating them so I know when I started praying for something specific from Bible study or just in conversations with my people. I can tell you it’s been one of the coolest things being able to look back and see how God has answered prayers over time. They are books full of reminders of God’s faithfulness.
I was discussing those journals with one of my best friends a couple of weeks ago and telling her how neat it was to be able to look back at them and see how God has moved in all these situations. He has been so faithful.
I think the natural reaction to having something you’ve prayed for being answered is praise and worship and it should be. But here is where the reframing comes into play. Most of those pages aren’t filled with requests for myself but for the people in my life. If I could find them all I could show you careers that were prayed over for years, lost family members that were saved, jobs, relationships, and a whole host of things that were answered over time. Yet in all of those God wasn’t just showing His faithfulness to my family and friends as He answered prayers. He was showing His faithfulness to me.
Maybe that isn’t a new thought to you, but I can tell you it was certainly new for me. Never had it occurred to me that God was showing how faithful He is to me as He moved in the lives of the people I love. It’s easy to see their prayers get answered and say He is faithful because He has been to them. But I prayed too. He is also faithful to me through how He works in those situations. Just because I wasn’t praying for myself doesn’t mean He wasn’t showing that faithfulness to me. My prayers for them were also answered.
Faithfulness in a whole new light. Maybe not a novel thought to anyone except me, but boy was it a revelation when it hit me. So next time you see God answer a prayer remember that faithfulness is being shown to you as well. He’s there. He’s listening. He’s working.
If you’ve never kept a prayer journal I highly encourage you to do so.
