Should we pray?

I just read something I wrote a long while back that really shook me up. I was going through an old notebook and found a section called crazy prayers, written May 7^th 2003. I wrote out a bunch of prayers I had that were very fantastic and large, and in any logical sense they weren’t things that would naturally happen in my life. They weren’t needs I had, but rather far-fetched desires. I remember thinking a lot about abundance at the time, and coming to the realization that God is not working against me but rather for me. God wants to bless me abundantly, and at least according to many verses in the bible, is waiting for me to ask. So I asked.

On my list I prayed that God would give Stacy and I a huge house that we could minister from, bringing people in and always having it be a place of healing and hope. I prayed that we would become people of great influence and that people would want to be apart of whatever we were doing. I prayed that we would have many great people around us, people desiring great things and making them happen. And maybe most implausible of all, I prayed that I would become focused and manage my time well. But all of this still sounds great to me, and seeing this list again made me hunger for the place I was then, really believing in the abundance of God and waiting expectantly for it. What did surprise me was that I prayed that I wouldn’t have to work fulltime by the next two years.

If I remember right, what I was thinking was that God would provide some surprising blessing where I could spend more time ministering to others. What I got was very different, and until looking at the list, I never realized the connection. Within a year and a half of praying for this specific request I started to get headaches every day. By January I finally told Stacy that I have had a headache non-stop for a month. A month later I went in to the doctor, hoping he would give me a better pain reliever than what I was used to. He was hesitant about that; sure it was my new glasses. But I persisted, and he ordered me an MRI. A month later when that came back I had a brain malformation, and the only possible cure would be surgery. I am still waiting for that surgery.

Soon after that I had to quit work because the pain was too much. Since then I have tried to find ways to alleviate the pain, but it is still very bad. I have learned to work around a lot of the pain, and am in graduate school with at least decent odds of being able to pull it off and graduate. But what do I do about this prayer? I prayed that God would pull me out of fulltime work within 2 years, and I haven’t worked fulltime since. This is why I have a hard time praying such huge prayers. I am afraid of the size of God. I am dealing with someone who has a very different sense of what I can handle than I do. If I open up to God, I have no guarantee that I will end up okay on the other end. So this is where I am now, a part of me scared out of my mind at the otherness, the unpredictability of the creator of the world that I have never seen or heard, and the other part of me saying what the hell.