My Mother's Prayers

Never underestimate the power of a prayer.  I've been praying since I was old enough to talk.  I've always loved words, and I love literature especially.  I find great power in the words that I read.  Nuances, cadence, and intonation all serve to convey emotion in a story.  They are part of the story, the words but the part that isn't really words as well.  I understand this when I'm reading a book, and yet when I'm talking to God or even THINKING about talking to God, I sometimes don't do it because I don't have the words.  Thankfully, God knows our hearts.  He knows our anxious thoughts, and I don't have to think, write, or say a single word for him to perceive exactly what I need or want.

In recent weeks, this idea has become very clear to me.  Over my lifetime, I feel like I've "barely prayed" if that makes any sense, and yet God has answered my prayers in  VERY REAL ways.  In high school, I prayed that God would give me a husband that loved God more than he loved me.  And he did.  After I married, I prayed that God would one day give me a daughter.  And he gave me two.  I prayed that as a family we would be able to both hear and heed God's direction for our lives.  And he brought us to Canton, Georgia.  Most of my life, I've barely prayed and yet God has heard me and answered me. 

My children are just now learning to pray.  When they hear me talk to God, they hear me asking him to help them grow into people that love Him and love others.  Those two things are really all I ever hope for them.  Reading a biography of Abraham Lincoln recently, I became intrigued by his religious views.  Although he clearly believed in God Almighty, he did not affiliate with any particular American denomination or church.  This is what he said:  "When any church will inscribe over its altar, as its sole qualification for membership, the Savior's condensed statement of the substance of both law and Gospel, 'Thou shalt love the lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul and thy neighbor as thyself' that church will I join with all my heart and all my soul."  Yes, that is what I hope for my children as well!

Lincoln also penned these words:  "I remember my mother's prayers, and they have always followed me.  They have clung to me all my life."  I love the imagery of the prayers following him, on his heels, literally clinging to him all his life.  Even if he wanted to, he could not fling them away.  They were a part of him because God heard his mother's prayer.  He answered her by giving little Abraham Lincoln a heart wholly devoted to God and others.  At a very pivotal and divisive time in our country's history, there stood a man whose mother's prayers enabled him to lead a nation on the brink of destroying itself and knit it back together.   I stand inspired by his testimony.  If God can answer me when I "barely pray", I wonder what he will do when I pray with such sticky conviction that my words endure the generations.