Be Careful What You Pray For

You know that saying, "Be careful what you pray for?" Well, here's a lesson in that.

Last Monday, I got bored. I was just flat out bored with life. I was bored of the same routine of waking up every day, getting Caleb, changing Caleb, feeding Caleb, playing with Caleb, putting Caleb down for a nap, and repeating those steps multiple times a day, every day. I STUPIDLY told God how bored I was and STUPIDLY asked Him to spice things up a bit and not just in my ordinary day to day life.

Spiritually, I was bored and I needed some motivation. I just wasn't 'feelin it'. I didn't have a desire to read the Bible, listen to worship music or pray. So, I asked God to help me by making my spiritual life, 'interesting.'

You would have thought I learned back when I was in labor with Caleb. While we were driving to the hospital, I STUPIDLY begged God for harder, stronger, contractions to let me know I was truly in labor. I didn't want to be THAT girl that got sent home for false labor. Anyway, two seconds later, while I was in the car on the Parkway, I got the worst contraction yet and I wanted to die. I remember thinking, "Did I REALLY just pray for that?!" Dumb.

So, here I was again on Monday, asking for God to spice things up. Of all the prayers I've prayed, God always seems to answer this one right away. Go figure. As you can imagine, it didn't take God long to answer my prayer, which wasn't even really a prayer, per se, more like a thought. I had that "thought" Monday afternoon. I never expected to wake up Tuesday to the chaos that ensued.

I was just waking up to Caleb talking in his crib when my husband storms in the bedroom and says, "Lovies, I think my car got towed." I was still half asleep, but I could tell he was mad. He was already late for work and this just made things worse. "What are you talking about?" was my response. Keep in mind I was still semi-comatose.  "My car got towed!" "No, that's not possible. Maybe someone stole it." "No, it got towed." was the conversation between my husband and me.

To make a long story short, his car did get towed because he forgot to hang the parking pass for our development on his rear view mirror. My husband ended up calling out of work for the day, which thank God doesn't hurt us financially because he gets paid salary, but the cost to the towing company did hit us in the wallet pretty hard.

The whole morning event pretty much ruined my husband's day and the mood in the house was miserable. Both my husband and I were frustrated, but since he was home we decided to call a Realtor, something we had been planning on doing for awhile, but just never got around to it. The whole towing situation gave us more motivation to move out of our place faster.

So we called the Realtor and she came over that afternoon. We were really excited to get the ball rolling on moving into a house, but we received bad news. Basically, we bought our condo when the market was still really high and now our place isn't worth that much. We can't roll over our loss into a new mortgage because they don't do that anymore so we either had to consider a short sale, which would kill our credit or foreclose.

In other words, we're stuck. I think my husband was more upset then I was, even though we both knew it was inevitable that we were staying in our condo for longer than we had planned. As you can imagine, this upset our day even more, but since I had asked God to make life interesting, I was somewhat prepared. I was ready for this and I was ready to prove to God that I would still praise Him in this storm. So, that's exactly what I did. I took to my Facebook status and proclaimed my joy even though our day pretty much sucked. No, it wasn't easy, exactly, but like I said, I was ready to prove to God I'd still serve Him no matter what.

I have to be honest, Saturday night at church (the Saturday before THAT Monday where I had THAT thought), John asked the question if we had no roof over our head and no food to eat, would we still praise God and thank Him regardless. Honestly, if life was that bad, I don't know if I could, but I wanted to prove to God that I was willing to try. When I asked God to spice life up a bit, I wanted something that would allow me to prove to Him that I would still thank Him and still praise Him no matter what.

Like I said, of all the prayers I've prayed, God answered this one pretty quickly. Then again, I don't always go asking God to hand me trials and tough times, so I guess it makes sense. Either way, one thing I learned about God through this is that He is the ultimate teacher. He is always teaching me something new whether it be through my trials, through my child, through people, or through my ordinary day to day life. He will find a way to reach me. I imagine I make His job a lot easier though when I pray for Him to 'make life interesting.'