We Prayed. Now What?, episode 66

0:00 If you love a prodigal, you can discover, help and hope for your wilderness journey right here at When You Love a Prodigal. And also help and hope for your own life journey. Did you ask for prayer for your loved one on the Worldwide Prodigal Prayer Day a few days ago on June 2nd? Did you pray? Were you expecting an answer within a week? Of course you were hoping for one. Do you grow weary of praying when you don't see what you want to happen? Do you think the answers you ask for will never come?

0:43 Do you feel like you have no idea how to pray effectively? I have felt all those emotions on many occasions, even right after the Worldwide Prodigal Prayer Day. Now you can be sure that many people prayed and your loved one's name was brought before the Lord many times. And God heard, he knows that person. He knows your heart. And so the prayer, the most effective thing we can do, happened. It's an incredible privilege to pray for each other. But it's also a battle.

1:25 I am always exhausted at the end of June 2nd, because the evil one doesn't like that we are praying for these that he thinks belong to him. We and those we pray for have an enemy who doesn't like that we are on our knees on their behalf. So what do we do now that we have prayed? First, we wait. Just what you wanted to hear. We wait to see what God is doing. Sometime we see immediate total answers. Other times we await the unfolding change.

2:08 Sometimes there are little glimpses of his responding to our prayers. Some of us will rejoice when we see this happen. Some of us will rejoice when we see this amazing transformation. But mostly we get to wait, which means we trust. We trust that God has heard and is answering our prayer. We have great assurance from his word that he desires for our prodigals to return to him and to us. So take comfort in these verses. 1 John, it says, this is the confidence we have in approaching God, that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us.

2:57 And if we know that he hears us, whatever we ask, we know that we have what we asked of him. He tells us that, that it is his will that they not perish. He wants them to come home. In Luke 15, he demonstrates the Father's great love and welcoming home of a prodigal. And that's what he's doing. It's just that we don't understand his timing and his ways of making it happen. But the best thing we can do next is thank him. And I know that's a hard thing to say. It's hard to think of saying thank you, Lord, when you're in pain and confusion and doubt and you're not seeing the prayers answered.

3:46 But if we thank him, we're recognizing that he is working even when we don't see it. We are admonished, encouraged to give thanks in all things, even when we don't observe what we hope for. We must remember that we look through a dark glass, Paul says in Romans, but God is always working even when we can't discern what he is doing. We wait, we trust. Out of the trust, we can say thank you. And we give love and grace as the hands and feet of our Savior to our love prodigals.

4:30 And if they keep hurting us and doing destructive things or totally separating from us, it's hard to think of showing love and grace. And yet that's what God calls us to do. He will woo them back with his loving kindness, he says in Romans. We are his primary means of extending that love and grace and kindness that will eventually draw them back to God and to us. We can keep hoping because we have a strong anchor to hold our hope, Jesus himself. We remember that God's promises are all yes in Christ.

5:15 So we have confidence to keep on hoping as we ask in the name of Jesus. And we keep on praying with hope, with perseverance, with assurance. A day set aside to pray for prodigals is wonderful, engaging us and our God for release of his grace and power. But we still need to keep praying. We are invited to keep on asking, seeking and knocking. Don't quit, keep praying. Yes, the waiting is hard, but guess what? That's when we learn and grow.

5:57 Because you see, it's not all about our prodigals. God's also working on us. He's very efficient. Even as he works on them, our hearts open up for him to work on us. Don't give up because God's doing something in you. We hear the scripture that sustained me through more than 15 years. I can't tell you how many times I went back to this scripture, it's in Isaiah 60, 22, just the last line. And God says, I am the Lord. And I think he pauses there so that I can recognize, and I am not.

6:40 He's the Lord, Judy is not, you're not. Then he says, in its time, I will do this swiftly. If you've been listening to this podcast very much, you know I've quoted that verse because it was probably the most significant one. Keep praying, keep waiting. I'm working, but in my time, God says, not in my time. I have learned so much in the years of waiting of hope born and hope dashed, of tearful prayers and answered prayers and not yet answered prayers, and surprises in some of the answers.

7:25 I have gained appreciation for ways that we made the journey well. And I see how some of our mistakes and approaches could have been better. Here are a few reflections that I have had as I've been in the waiting. I was eager for our son to get restored, but we were waiting. And God was doing these kinds of work in our lives. First of all, he enabled us to do some things well. Some things like we gave him lots of opportunities to explore what he liked, enjoyed, and was good at. We did soccer, he loved surfing, he loved fishing, he loved paintball, he tried bowling, he did photography.

8:13 Whatever he was willing to try, we want him to see some things that show what a valuable person he is and that he has things to offer. That was more in his younger years. We allowed him to have several pets. I like animals, but not as many as he liked. He had up to three dogs at once, he had a couple of cats, he had a couple of iguanas. Once was named Al, that was short for alligator, it was so big. He had mice who had babies, and he loved snakes, which makes me shudder. We'd had some fun family travels, and he really enjoyed them and probably was happiest in his time just with the family.

9:00 When we went to Texas or to Colorado, the two main places we would go. We introduced him to men that were friends of ours, but who chose to invest in his life. And they spent time with him, and they prayed for him. Probably one of the best was the surfing pastor. Josh loved to surf, and a friend sent him all the way to California to spend a week with this pastor who taught kids how to surf and helped him with church set up. It was a wonderful week he came home and said, that's the most fun I've ever had.

9:41 And I've reminded him of that occasionally when he wanted to do something he thought was fun. Another thing that we did well, we introduced him to friends of the children of our friends, and some of them became his closest buddies. We took him to church, youth group, prayed with him every night, provided spiritually enriching opportunities. Again, this was more in his younger years when he was growing up and living with us, and those things didn't happen as much as he was on his own. As he made increasingly destructive choices and seemed out of control and unwilling for us to help him, we reluctantly put him in a residential program, which I've mentioned, and it was a challenge, but a very valuable time.

10:34 So those are things we think we did a pretty good job. Now here are the things that we think were the most important that we did well. We kept loving him unconditionally. Because of abandonment issues with his birth family, he didn't believe that we really loved him. So we never quit and made every effort to help him know that we loved him and would not quit. We had appropriate boundaries for him and for us with corresponding consequences, presented and enforced with a lot of grace, and we usually lived by them.

11:15 Not perfectly, but we extended grace and mercy over and over because he needed it. And all of us need grace and mercy, especially from the people we love. And we prayed and prayed and prayed. Now, in my reflection on what was happening in our son's life while I waited to see the answers to prayer, I did recognize that we made plenty of mistakes. And just a few of those, because we didn't comprehend the damage done to him in utero by his birth mom, we didn't know how to respond to some of his special needs.

11:58 And we had to learn those and adjust to them, but it took time. Because his needs and his choices required a lot of attention, I focused so much of my time on caring for him and supervising him and trying to help him that too often I neglected my other children. And I deeply regret that I didn't handle that better. My husband and I also did not always agree on the best approach for him. And so sometimes we let our son create tension between us. We had to learn how to work through that. But I want to make sure you understand, though there were lots of lessons for us and we did some things well and not everything well, but here's the best part.

12:47 We discovered that our son was an incredible gift in our lives. Some of the ways that he was a gift. I learned about mercy and grace in unconditional love at a far deeper level than I had ever experienced before. I learned how to pray, that is really pray. I'm in a ministry and we pray a lot. And so I thought, I know how to pray. And then I was desperate and I went into a much deeper level of beseeching the Lord and praying for our son. I was thrown into the arms of the Lord and discovered a wonderful dependence on him beyond anything I'd ever known before.

13:34 I thought I trusted and depended on God. But when it came to something I could do nothing about and it was scary, I could only really lean on him. Despite all the conflict, pain, disappointment, fear, heartache, and my relationship with our son, I still have a treasured relationship with him. We talk often. He shares the things that are hard for him. He calls and says, please pray for me today. God has done a work, but it took a long time. So I wanna encourage you, don't give up.

14:17 God's gonna answer your prayers. It may not look like what you were hoping, but he will. And he will bring about change, but he will bring about change in your life as well. And that is a wonderful gift. Now these are not comprehensive thoughts. They're just some of the things that God showed me. I have only recently really been able to breathe freely enough concerning our son that he's on a good path, that I can step back and reflect about it. With any prodigal, they come and they do well. They go to rehab and they're clean. Things look good, and then it's not.

15:00 And so there's this lurking sense, well, it's good now, but will it last? And God just says, hold on, we're doing this together. And I wanna close this time with just this beautiful thought. I wanna give you a picture that'll help you stay on your knees. We learn in scripture that your prayers are a sweet aroma to the Lord now and in eternity. Listen to these words from Revelation. Then I saw a lamb looking as if it had been slain, standing at the center of the throne.

15:43 He went and took the scroll from the right hand of he who was sitting on the throne. And when he had taken it, the four living creatures and 24 elders fell down before the lamb. Each one had a harp, and they were all holding golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of God's people. So at the throne, at the time when Jesus does away with Satan, and we're coming to the end of the world as we know it, and a new heaven and a new earth, and the lamb will reign, and he is being lifted up by the sweet aroma of our prayers coming up before him.

16:30 So even if you've been praying and praying, and God calls you home, and you still haven't seen the answer that you were looking for, your prayers are still working. God is still loving that you have brought them to him. And you may not see the answer, but you can know that it's still before the Lord, and it's a sweet aroma of fragrance that comes to God and reminds him of you and your loved one. Do you see what it's saying? Your prayers and my prayers are incense offered to our savior. The lamb receives them as a fragrant gift.

17:12 All that you have begged of God for your wonder is still working into eternity. Don't despair. Keep our king awash in the perfume of your worship and surrender and trust in him. Let the sweet aroma of your entreaties delight him. And may you be assured that he hears. He is responding, and someday you will see how he has answered. I encourage you to take a few minutes and think, all right, what am I taking away from this? I've given you actually a lot of content today.

17:52 What can you take from this and apply? Especially as we have finished this day of prayer, that you'll just have eyes and ears and heart and mind open to see what God is doing and to trust him and be able to say thank you, Lord. Be sure to join us next week as I chat with Dana Russo, who is a grief counselor who has the nickname, the slogan of a companion in grief. And when you love a prodigal, you know what grief is. And she's gonna come alongside us. God bless you.