Praying Faith Part 2 of Praying Peace

I posted recently my struggle between whether to pray peace or pray contentment for Axl throughout the year. The choice was important and did need to be prayerfully considered, but really it went much deeper than that for me. For me, it became my need to help God help Axl.

After Warren’s prayer, I told him my conflict between the two words and the thoughts that surrounded the choice. It was when I expressed the process out loud that God revealed to me that my anxiety had been about control, specifically my desire to control God. I wanted to control God, because I didn’t trust that He could really understand what Axl needed without my fully explaining it to Him.

I’ve tried to revise and reword that so it didn’t say anything remotely close to “I didn’t trust”, but to say it any other way is simply a lie. Please know that while there is now no more condemnation for believers, there absolutely is conviction of sin by the Holy Spirit and thank you God for it. I looked at Warren as the realization flooded over ever ounce of my being and simply said, “I was trying to control God.” Oh my goodness my heart was broken. My sin was obvious. I had not trusted.

More than ten years ago a college professor told my class that control was a sign of insecurity. Mortified at the possibility of my being insecure - can you even imagine? (I hope sarcasm translates on paper) - I made it clear to my classmates that my control issue came directly as a result of my arrogance. Sad, that I thought arrogance was a much more attractive quality than insecurity. To me, no one could possibly do any job as good as I could and for that reason I sought to control every aspect of a project. Team player I was not. Now I understand that my professor and I were both mistaken in our evaluation of control.

At the heart of control is a lack of trust. When I seek to control my loved ones it is because I don’t trust them to make the best decisions without my help. And when I sought to control God it was the same. How arrogant of me to presume that they need my help – that the One who holds the universe could possibly benefit from any explanation or advice that I might offer.

My controlling nature is an aspect of my personality that I have accepted and many times have worn like a badge of honor. I let myself believe that it doesn’t really hurt anybody. After all, I affirm my husband as the head of our house and I try desperately not to cross the boundary there. We laugh as if it’s just another quirky quality. The truth of the matter is that the need to control is rooted in sin, and harboring a little sin because it makes me feel better inevitably leads me into areas of greater temptation and deeper in sin. Like going from trying to control my loved ones to trying to control God.

One of my first jobs was as a receptionist at a local hair salon. I started in steamy July and for any self-respecting, eighteen-year-old, southern girl going to work in the “beauty parlor”, that meant wearing the cutest open toed shoes that one could find. What I didn’t know is that freshly cut hair can act like a splinter, and my super cute sandals provided the perfect entry point for tiny chards of hair to get under my skin and become embedded. Now, tiny slithers of hair are well, tiny and the first time one of them made it self at home in my skin I wasn’t immediately aware of it. After a few days of walking around, however, I can assure you that it made its presence known. It started to hurt, and then it started to ache, and before long every step was an excruciating task that I would liken to walking on nails, if I had ever done so. Like a splinter, removing it was painful, but once it was out, the pain subsided and the hurt that it brought went away. After my first encounter with a hair splinter, I learned to come home each day and make sure that there were no hairs under the skin, and if they were, to deal with them immediately.

Isn’t sin so the same way. Hard to notice at first, but once it’s embedded it’s painful to deal with and painful to remove. The daily hair checks remind me that I have to be as diligent with my soul, continually asking God to search my heart and make sin known to me.

Psalms 139:23-24 says, “Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”

The Transparent Me has been a great way for God to point out my offensive ways, and it culminated that day in the car on the way to the airport. My sticky note had a p.s. and it read:

p.s. You need to lose control!

So this year while I’m praying peace for Axl, I’m praying faith for me.

With much love,

Tonya