Prayer – Page 6 – Karla Jo Wasion

dear friend

Dear Friend,

I prayed for you last night and before I could really say much at all He showed me a picture and gave me words.

“That horse was made to run, but he fights the narrow place that is the starting gate, because he can’t see beyond it.

He fights the narrow place because he can’t see that it is the gateway to what he was created to do.

He fights because he’s afraid of the narrow place.”

I thought about this picture and these narrow places that some horses and some people fight. What I think, my friend, is that it’s mostly about trust.

So I have to ask…do you trust God? Do you trust that in the narrow place what hinders you will be stripped from you because He’s preparing you to run? Because narrow means nar.row. Pride and fear and the need to control just don’t fit in this place.

Do you trust that even though it feels like the sides of this place are pressing you hard and there’s no room to move here, God is in this narrow space with you and He brought you here for a good purpose?

Do you trust that the gate will open? Because it will. And you will run, because you were made for it my friend.

You were made to be more than afraid.

And friend, there is someone else who is afraid of your narrow place. Someone who will do anything to keep you out of it.

Someone who watched as Jesus went into a narrow place called Gethsemane, and watched as He came out of that narrow place headed for the cross and nothing was going to stop Him and just look at what happened.

So you aren’t the only one fighting that narrow place. But you are the only one who will come out of the fight victorious.

Because you have God on your side. He is for you, not against you. His plans for you are good and His plans will prevail and you will live your destiny. He is before you and behind you and on every side. You will be victorious because the liar and his lies will bow to the Truth that lives in you and in the narrow place a stronghold will crumble.

You will go into that narrow place and there God will prepare you for what is on the other side of that gate and you will come out running.

Because you were made for this.

So anyway, just wanted to let you know I prayed for you last night. God showed up. It was good.

Love,

Your friend

i will not die in this place

I had a vague sense of what God was calling me to this year, but it was just that. Vague. Wispy. Fragile.

But I knew He was calling. I could hear His voice. Ever have that? You know He’s speaking, but you can’t make out the words? Like the wind picks them up and carries them off before they can reach your heart.

Until you draw closer. Until you get up from your wilderness spot where you’ve set up camp and head toward the sound of the voice that makes the hunger in you start to gnaw.

Until you get close enough to realize He’s saying the last thing you expected to hear.

“So we see that they were not able to enter, because of their unbelief.”

Third chapter of Hebrews hit me like a brick in the back of the head. Those people who seem so far removed from me wandered in their wilderness until they died because they did not believe God.

I had stopped believing (cue Journey song. In your head. All day. You’re welcome).

And from the book of Hebrews His voice rose to meet my weary hunger. “Wilderness wandering is not your destiny. It is not what I had for them, and it is not what I have for you.

Do you believe Me?”

So I went to the place where my belief was safely tucked away. Fifteen or so journals filled with the cries of a heart that believed God.

I read and remembered and cried because I don’t know what happened.

I read and remembered that my life is proof that God hears and God moves.

I read and remembered that all things are possible with God.

I read and remembered what I believe.

And I don’t know if I came out of the wilderness, or if He tired of calling me and came in after me.

All I know is His voice is clear, His call for me this year is certain, no longer vague and wispy, lost in the hot wind of my wilderness.

This year, I will pray again with boldness and passion. I will ask Him for impossibles because I believe all things become possible in His hand.

I will pray for those I love who do not walk with Him to have knock down encounters with the living God. Encounters that leave no room for doubt that Jesus Christ is both Lord and Savior and that the danger to their soul does not pass with magic words but with knees that bow and necks that bend.

I will pray for marriages to be restored and not just restored but made brand new.

I will pray that depression and despair pack their bags and depart from the Beloved and that the door hits them firm on their way out.

I will pray for the broken to be healed, the chained to be set free and the lukewarm to be set on fire.

I will pray for prodigals to come to their senses and come running home to a Father that is waiting to kiss their neck.

I will pray for power from on high to come upon the Bride of Christ and make her into the formidable foe to darkness that she is meant to be.

I will pray because I believe God moves and the spiritual realm shifts to attention when the people of God cry out from the faith He has given them.

I will not pray from a place of desperation or resignation. I will not utter words from my lips while my heart remains silent in unbelief.

I will not pray for what is possible for man, but for what is only possible for an all powerful God who sits on the throne of heaven with His feet on the footstool of earth.

This year, I will pray because I believe God.

This year, I will not die in the wilderness.

i prayed today

So this morning I turned a table over. I prayed. I didn’t see angels or hear the Hallelujah chorus. I just slipped into the secret place and I talked to the One who was waiting for me there. Waiting to show me something.

“She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her: “You are the God who sees me,” for she said, “I have now seen the One who sees me.” (Genesis 16:13)

I said it out loud, several times. “You are the God who sees me.”

Until I could finally admit that I was uncomfortable with that.

It’s hard to be seen, especially when we are at our worst. People go to great lengths to look their best when they know people will be looking at them. Some women won’t leave the house unless they are in full makeup and every hair is in place. I count it a good day if my socks match, because frankly, that’s the best I can do.

But I need to be okay with being seen by God. It’s much scarier than being seen by people, because I know that He sees everything I can hide from you.

So that was my prayer today.

“Help me stop hiding. Help me be willing to stand before You as who I really, really am. I want to be comfortable under Your gaze, and right now I’m not.”

And His perfectly aimed response shook the secret place.

“Because you believe that all I see is what you see. “

Nothing is hidden from His sight. Holy and unholy, the pure and the impure. Selfishness and selflessness. Disobedience, and even the smallest act of obedience. Every weakness, every imperfection, and the grace that covers all of it. His eyes miss nothing.

But here is the truth that can bring a girl out of hiding, and to her knees…

He is the God who sees me, and He doesn’t look away.

I prayed today. It was good.

my money changers

I don’t know how to write about it so I’ll just put down words and see if they make sense.

I think there are money changers in the temple that is me. Yeah..how’s that for a start?

Every time I walk into my prayer room that hasn’t heard much prayer lately, I see my prayer journals that haven’t been written in much lately, sitting on the table. They stare at me. I stare back. Sometimes I stick my tongue out at them and walk away. I am a prayer-less woman with a prayer room and prayer journals. And guilt. Lots of guilt. Because I love prayer and I know the power of it, I know the importance of it and I haven’t been very engaged in it.

But God. He’s not one to just let a thing go now is He? He stares too, just like those stupid journals and I haven’t the nerve to stick my tongue out but I do walk away. But then there is my bible, sitting open right next to my keyboard. Open to this passage…

“When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem.In the temple courts he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple courts, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves he said,’Get these out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a market!’ His disciples remembered that it is written: ‘Zeal for your house will consume me.'” John 2:13-17

While there are probably several reasons for Jesus’ anger, I believe the fact that they were in the temple courts, the only place the Gentiles could pray, is one of them. In the other gospels Jesus is recorded as saying that His Father’s house is to be a house of prayer. The money changers were in the place of prayer.

And then this came to mind…

“Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in your midst?” 1Corinthians 3:16

And that’s when the thought seeped it’s way into my frontal lobe.

“I think I have money changers in the temple.”

Things that have set up shop in the place they should not be, in the place of prayer. I can name a few of them.

Complacency. Fear. Worry. Unbelief. Busyness. Escape. I’m sure there’s more. Maybe some of them are even good things that have taken the place of the better thing. My money changers.

And you know what grieves me the most? It isn’t just that I have stopped interceding for other people, or that my journals have empty pages.

It’s that I’ve stopped talking to my Father. That’s why I wept tonight. Because I know He desires to hear my voice. He leans in for it. I know He waits for me to cry out to Him, to come to Him. He waits to answer what I’m not asking.

So I think there are some tables that need to be turned over. I think a little zeal is in order.

Thanks for letting me talk all of that out. It may not have made much sense to you, but talking about it helped me. Thanks for listening.

a few thoughts on a good friday

I got up this morning after not enough sleep, made my coffee and sat down in front of the crucifixion. The story is familiar and strange, breathtaking and gut wrenching. Bloody and beautiful.

It is His story and it is mine, but we see it through different eyes.

“But I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith may not fail.”

He sees prayer. I see betrayal.

“Jesus replied, ‘Do what you came for, friend.'”

He sees a friend. I see an enemy. A traitor.

“Then Jesus said to them, ‘Do not be afraid. Go and tell My brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see Me.’”

He sees brothers. I see deserters and cowards.

His story and mine, all tangled together. I am the one He came to save and He is the One who came to save me. I had sin, He had blood and now there is blood where there used to be sin. Our stories dance together and look nothing alike.

His eyes and mine see it all so differently.

I see sinner, He sees daughter.

I see shame He sees the cross.

Seen through different eyes, our stories come together and it’s Friday. We meet at Golgotha, each bringing what is needed to the cross.

My nails, His hands. My sin, His blood. My anger, His love. My weakness, His strength. His provision, my need. His death, my life.

His story and mine all tangled together

in a beautiful bloody kind of way.

I will never be the same. He will never change.

It’s a Good Friday.

Luke 22:31; Matthew 26:50; Matthew 26:56; Matthew 28:10

faith has to move

It came to me as I stood on the chair, almost cutting off my head in the ceiling fan blades. Maybe not cutting off really, but the thwack of even a dull fan blade would have hurt. Anyway, that’s when it hit me. Right up there on the chair, in my little prayer room, as the woman on my couch looked on with a deer-in-the-headlights look on her face. And who could blame her? I’d have that look too if I was her and not me.

Faith is moving.

That’s what came to me as I stood on the chair trying to demonstrate trust to the poor woman on my couch. I stood there and pretended to fall back because I need visuals most times and I hoped she appreciated my attempt, awkward as it was. The look on her face never really changed, so I couldn’t tell.

Faith moves, even when we are “being still and knowing that He is God”. Because being still is movement too, I think. It takes a lot of trust to stay very still when you want to hide or get busy fixing this mess. Being still is still falling backward, as long you know that He is God.

Faith is trust and trust falls backward into the waiting arms of God, knowing He will be there. It knows and it falls back and God always catches faith.

Faith reaches for the hem of the garment, falling backward into the Healer’s arms. “Take heart, daughter…your faith has healed you.”

Faith follows, crying out for mercy the whole way. “Do you believe I can do this?”. Blind men see because God always catches faith.

Faith steps out onto water and it speaks to mountains and it walks through the fire and all of it is letting go, knowing God won’t drop you.

I listened to the woman on my couch, heard her hard story, and her brand new, shaky, trying-to-believe faith that was keeping the needle out of her arm. As she talked, I could feel myself getting overwhelmed. It felt like that time last year when God said “Pack” and I was looking at 28 years of stuff and thinking there’s not enough boxes on earth and where do I begin?

So faith reached for my Bible and He caught me there and said “tell her about love”. Because her life had been just so hard and when someone has been kicked around that much you have to start with the love that died for her before the needle ever left her arm, before she stopped being for sale. She needs to know that we don’t fall backward into anger or disappointment or “shame on you”. It’s love that has arms out to catch us.

And every little movement is faith – the reaching, the leaving, the following, the coming through the roof for your healing. This is the falling, the trusting, the letting go and believing He will catch you and not drop you.

Faith must move.

Because faith that stands still, unable to move, unwilling to even shift its feet? That’s not faith, that’s fear and there will be no falling backward in that. And every so often I have to repeat it to myself, God doesn’t catch what isn’t falling.

Today, let your faith move.

Reach for Him.

Speak to a mountain.

Come through the roof to get your healing.

Step out of the boat.

If you don’t have enough, give anyway.

Share the gospel.

Go.

Love.

God will catch you.

Matthew 9:22; Matthew 9:28-29; Matthew 14:29; Matthew 17:20; Romans 5:8;

the prayer that changed my prayer

“For this reason I, Paul, the prisoner of Christ Jesus for the sake of you Gentiles—”

This is Paul’s opening to chapter 3 of his letter to the Ephesians. And then he goes off-roading a bit, with the explanation of his calling to preach to the gentiles. This is why we have to connect Paul’s prayer in chapter 3, not to the 12 verses above it, but to the ending verses in chapter 2.

So it would look like this:

“Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God’s people and members of God’s household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.”

“For this reason I kneel before the Father…”

His language points back to the Old Testament and the building of the temple…the dwelling place for God’s glory.

And then he prayed for power. Power to trust Christ so He could dwell in their hearts. Be at home there. Settle down and ‘dwell fixedly there’. (Vines Expository Dictionary)

He tells them that they are rooted and grounded in love. The words speak of a foundation. The foundation for the gentiles being included into the family of God was love.

{We, you and I, are laid upon that same foundation. Love is why we are His.}

He prayed that God’s power would enable them to grasp the dimensions of Christ’s love, how truly expansive it is, and to know that love.

And I heard God speak to me words that began a quaking in me.

“How wide, high, long and deep was the chasm that sin created between you and Me? I want you to intimately experience the love that poured into that chasm, filling it completely and beyond, until it was a chasm no longer.”

{This grasping has me gasping for air.}

..and to know this love that surpasses knowledge.

gnōsis. It is the general knowledge of the Christian religion.

{Take what you think you know about the love of Christ, throw it as far as you can and see where it lands. His love will go beyond it. That is love that surpasses knowledge. It is beyond what we can know with our minds, no matter how much we investigate and study.}

He LOVES more than we can KNOW.

Power for faith. Power to grasp love. Power to know love.

{Everything needs the power of God. Everything.}

Why was he praying for all of this?

So that God, and His glory can fill the temple…the Church…you. me.

Paul didn’t pray what he prayed because it sounded good, and maybe had a shot at being answered.

{He prayed what God breathed.}

But it is God’s next breath that has changed my prayer life.

More. IMMEASURABLY more. Exceedingly above and beyond more. More than I can ask. More than I would even consider asking, could imagine asking.

My prayers do not set the boundaries for God. They are not His finish line, they are His starting line.

Ephesians 3:14-21; Ephesians 2:19-22; 2Timothy 3:16

You were made to be more than afraid.

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God will catch you.

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My prayers do not set the boundaries for God. They are not His finish line, they are His starting line.

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