Five years ago, a powerful song called, “The Goodness of God” was released and when CeCe Winans sang it, you could almost hear the heavenly host joining in.
It has become one of my favorite worship songs because so often, we come to the throne of grace with our requests for help. We need healing. We need relief. We need an answer to a long-asked question. I Peter 5:7 gently reminds us, “Cast all your cares on Him because He cares for you.” God welcomes our tear-filled prayers because His love for us is so vast.
However, I have recently been reminded that as we approach the Lord with requests, we are often sitting smack dab in the middle of a long ago answered prayer. How often do we look back and thank Him for those? In the fast-paced culture that comprises our daily life, it is so easy to simply move along to the next need in our lives without stopping to look back and view our lives through the lens of His goodness. A negative diagnosis. A job offer. A healthy relationship. Things that were once in our prayer request journals are now on the long-forgotten praise lists.
As a self-proclaimed “late bloomer”, I found myself crying out to the Lord so often throughout my twenties and early thirties. While friends were joyously picking out bridesmaids’ dresses and adding items to their wedding registries, I was enduring one bad date after another. I dreaded Mother’s Day because it was a painful reminder of what I didn’t have…a family of my own. However, I was surrounded by wonderful friends, a church community I loved, and I had a passport with stamps in it…a prayer I had prayed in college. I had had the opportunity to go to Honduras on a medical mission trip during nursing school and it was life changing. I prayed that God would allow me to travel and see more of this incredibly beautiful world He created.
He answered that prayer, but I was too wrapped up in what I DIDN’T have in that moment to see what I did have. I had the freedom to travel with other single girlfriends and experience different people and cultures. He gave me the opportunity to spend five months in West Africa and live in a mud hut village. I found out what a donkey burger tastes like (and realized that my ride into the village the week before was now on my plate).
Because God’s ways are much higher than ours, the way in which He answers prayer is often far different from what we imagined. My string of horrendous bad dates continued until my mid 30’s because God still had things to teach me about finding my happiness and joy in Him. By this point in life, a few of my friends who had married in their early 20’s were now getting divorced. I decided that I would rather stay single than settle for “good enough” just to have a ring on my finger.
That is when God sent him. A co-worker set me up on a blind date for which I had zero expectations. Twelve days later, I knew he was the one and sixteen months later, we said, “I do”. It wasn’t on my timeline, but it was His perfect timing. What I saw as late, He saw as love. His delay in answering my 20-something prayer helped me to grow up a little more and experience more of the adventures for which I had prayed in college.
Oh, and that passport with stamps in it? It turned out that my last blind date had a passport of his own with even more stamps than mine. God knows exactly what He is doing. He is never late and He loves you more than you can possibly imagine.
He is a good, good God.
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