Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.”
NL Daily Devotion for Monday, March 10, 2025
by R. M. Fergus, Clergy Stuff
I wish I fully believed this. I really do. I mean, I can point to so many examples of times when it seemed as though God showed up for me right when I needed it. Emotionally. Spiritually. Physically. Financially. So many coincidences and serendipities and near misses and seeming impossibilities. But there’s absolutely no way I can say unequivocally that these were proof of God’s action in my life. Because there are far too many people out there for whom these things don’t happen. While my former husband and I were hit by a drunk driver in Chicago in 1993 and miraculously walked away, there were 629 other Illinois fatalities in drunk driving incidents that year. When I wanted to get pregnant and instantly did (twice, ’98 and ‘00) my sister and several friends had miscarriages and/or struggled to conceive. The same year my biopsy following an abnormal mammogram turned out to be nothing (‘13), my sister’s turned out to be cancer. And while I hit the ever-loving jackpot in the online dating arena a couple years ago, I know plenty of other divorced women my age who just cannot find the right partner.
So what gives? It’s a question I can’t answer. No one can. Yet Jesus makes us this promise. That if we persist in prayer, God will answer. All I can say for sure is that over and over again, I pray to let go. I pray for the willingness to just keep at it, whatever “it” might be, and for the trust that it will work out as it should, even if it doesn’t look the way I want. I pray for trust and for endurance and hope and willingness and release, and these things do come. And I can’t even say these simple things come for everyone who asks for them. I just can’t. But for me, at least so far, they have and they do. So I keep my prayers simple, and I keep on walking, knowing that the one absolute guarantee is that God is walking right there with me, in and around and through me, and that is enough.
When have I felt my prayers went unanswered? When have I felt they were answered? How do I discern when God shows up?
