By So I started listening to a book this week call The Circle Maker (Amazing Book BTW) and at one part the author tells the story of the blind man named Bartimaeus. For those of us who have been in the church awhile we have heard this story before, you know Bartimaeus cries out to Jesus when he hears that he is passing, everyone tells him to be quiet and he just gets louder and gets Jesus’ attention and Jesus heals him. Well that is the basic gist of the story. For some reason there is a part that I have never noticed in the story that just hit home. Jesus asked Bartimaeus “What do you want me to do for you?” (Mark 10:51). Now Jesus knew that Bartimaeus was blind, right? Of course he did! So clearly this man wanted to see, why then did Jesus ask him what he wanted him to do for Bartimaeus? In the book The Circle Maker, the author says it because Jesus needed to hear it from him. Which makes sense right? In James 4:2b it says “Yet you don’t have what you want because you don’t ask God for it.” So I took some time after this to think and to pray. What do I want? What do I want Jesus to do?
You know what happened when I asked myself what do I want Jesus to do? I drew a complete and total blank and could not think of anything specific. I could think in these loft theoretical ideas but when it came down to a specific thing that I wanted Jesus to do for me, nothing. The thing is, there are things there, I just could not wrap my head around asking for Jesus to do something specific and some of the things seemed so unimportant that I did not want to waste His time on it. I am sure you can imagine what happened then right? Yep! God totally called me on that and reminded me that He knows the number of hairs on our head and that no matter how unimportant it might seem, it is still an area we need to give to Him. So I started to pray and I put out some small things as I tried to make the big things in my mind able to be put into words. Day 1 of praying this I said ok, Jesus I want you to move my dissertation through the process and I want to finish this dissertation. Funny story the next morning, was I was about to start my prayer time I got an email notification that my proposal had moved from my committee member to the university reviewer. Just a little increase in faith there right? So Day 2 comes and I am praying over the small things and decide I am going to try and put some words to the big things, and you know as I started to pray those big things became very clear and the words were more specific than I expected and went a direction I was not expecting. I am still in the very early stages of this process, but as I pray more specific for things the things that were cloudy in my mind or vague are becoming much more clear.
So today, the challenge is to ask yourself, What do I want Jesus to do? Where do I need Jesus to move? If you need someone to come alongside you in prayer, message me I will join you in prayer.
