Prayer Can Take Time

My wife and I are not green thumbs by any stretch. In fact, we have searched for ways to reduce the amount of plants and flower beds we have around our home. Yet, some plants seem to take on a life of their own. No matter what you do, they continue to come back year after year.

Take hostas for example. It doesn’t seem like there is any possible way to stop them from multiplying once they get going. They’re like rabbits of the plant family. More and more pop up every year and we try our best to move them around so they aren’t overly crowded. However, sometimes there are simply too many.
Though they multiply somewhat rapidly, if you try and move them too early in their growth, they will not survive (should have been a duh moment for me, but I digress). This is something I was unaware of until I tried to relocate a few from our home to our shop earlier this year. It was through this process that God chose to quietly & patiently teach me a lesson on prayer.

After we had some landscaping done at our shop and the mulch was spread, it looked quite bare and unappealing out front. So I decided to transplant a few hostas from our home to see if we couldn’t spruce things up a bit. Once planted, I made sure to water them at least once a day, but tried to give them a fresh drink twice daily. I was hopeful…at first. But it didn’t take long to see that they did not seem to be taking very well and were beginning to slowly turn yellow. Even for a novice green thumb, I knew it was looking grim for these fledgling plants.

My optimism was fading quickly, but I really felt these plants could be saved, even though I was informed that I moved them way too early. So I reached way into my back pocket for an old trick I once heard about somewhere. I decided to pray over them. Every time I watered them, I prayed over them. I mean, God is the One Who gives life to everything, so why not get Him involved, right? Probably would have been smarter to do this from the beginning, but that’s a sermon for another day.

So I did it. I prayed over them every day at least once, sometimes twice. It felt weird if I were being totally honest. It’s a plant; it naturally does this on it’s own. It shouldn’t need prayer to give it a boost of motivation to cling onto life. But, I did it anyway simply because I felt like I should. And you know what happened? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. In fact, they got worse. Eventually, the leaves turned fully yellow and fell flat on the ground. The front of the shop would have looked better bare. For me, it was quite discouraging.

So I did what any normal person would do in this situation. I quit praying and I quit watering them. I just left them for dead and moved on with my head hung low. In these moments it’s real easy for us to begin believing lies that God doesn’t hear us or that we’ve messed up to badly for Him to bother answering our prayers. I mean, it’s a stupid plant. Why would He care that much about it? He has better things to do than listen to me pray over a plant.

That was about a month or so ago. I continued to pull and spray weeds while looking at the lifeless remnants that had become these once hopeful hostas. I continued to express a little frustration at their condition and was convinced my prayers were dead. Not literally, but in this case they definitely did not get heard. Or so I thought.

As God would have it, He decided to show off a little bit this week and teach me a lesson in the process. I had been away from the shop for a period of time with other responsibilities and had fallen behind on pulling weeds. As you can imagine, they were doing their best to take over. When I got to the front of the property I really didn’t pay that much attention at first. But suddenly it hit me seemingly out of nowhere. The hostas live!! New life had sprung up from the ground and He began to speak – not only in that moment, but over the next couple of days as well.

In a nutshell, He was teaching me that not all prayers are answered immediately. Pretty much all prayers are heard when prayed, but some underground work may be required before the answer can come to light (see what I did there?). Sometimes, something has to die in order to make room for life. And all prayer requires patience and faith believing that, once prayed, He has already begun the work whether we see it or not. But we need to keep praying and not lose heart.

Whether the hostas live or not from here on, the lesson has been learned – hopefully. We live in an instant gratification society, but God does not live on our timescale. He may even intentionally take His time on something simply to teach us a lesson on how He truly works. I should have kept praying and not given up. But even in that, He kept working and eventually brought about the result.

If you’re praying, or were once praying, for something or someone and you have not seen any movement on God’s part, please keep praying. Don’t give up. Someone very well may be relying on those feeble prayers that, to us, seem like they aren’t even being heard. But He hears you, my friend! Trust that He hears you. He may have you adjust your prayer just a little, but He is always listening to the prayers from the heart of someone who is truly seeking His best.