A 4 Year Old’s Knock
More times than not, if we’re being honest, prayer is a difficult thing to do. To abandon the tangible and dwell in the spiritual requires patience, focus, and commitment. Three things that are incredibly difficult to ask of a four year old. Which is why I was so blindsided recently as my four year old and I prayed together. We were floating by a sand bar on a long and playful Saturday at the lake. My little one had been struggling with hiccups for the last hour and IYKYK, he was beginning to get pretty fussy about it. We tried all the normal remedies and all I could do was hold him away from our company as he became increasingly more irritated. I whispered, “would you like to ask God if He will remove them?” Its like we had wondered through the streets of remedies asking for help, seeking a solution and there was one door we hadn’t knocked on. That strange door tucked just out of view from Main St. Admittedly, that was the only card I had left. He whined a soft yes to my invitation. I told him to repeat after me, “Lord, please take away my hiccups. Amen.” You could hear the little, but mighty determination in his prayer.
If you were to tell me that one of my favorite prayer stories would come from Lake Travis and involved hiccups, I would likely laugh. Hiccups fall into the territory of petty and low visibility. If I were to compare them geographically I might say Cut & Shoot or I don’t know… Nazareth. And what good can come out of small towns like that?
Most family prayers are done in a traditional sort of way, and that’s great. Tradition instills priorities and teaches consistency, but if we’re not careful we can lose sight of the power in a prayer. So as I mentioned earlier, while rituals may be easy, true prayer can be incredibly difficult. True prayer insists that we abandon the tangible and dwell in the spiritual. This requires patience, focus, and commitment.
Patience because we are constantly stimulated. Everything in our world is here and now and on demand, while prayer asks us to wait on the Lord, to seek his will over our own. Counsel in any matter requires patience, but with the Lord, we truly don’t know when or how He will respond to us. So we wait on the Lord. (John 10:3) A four year old, no matter how disciplined they may be, will typically lose interest in a waiting game that takes too long.
Focus because we don’t just wait and wander aimlessly. We engage post inquiry. The scripture teaches us to ask, then seek (Matthew 7:7). To clarify though, no amount of focus or muster can answer our own prayer, but we do trust that the Lord hears and is actively working all things together for His glory. So we lean in after we ask. We expect to see the Lords hand sweep through our lives. We make every arrangement to adjust our focus to the spiritual in hopes that we just might see what is typically so fuzzy. As one writer said, “Stare at the unseen.” A four year old may actually be better at this one than us. A childlike faith of the invisible interacting with the visible. And this is where the story of the hiccups got so sweet for me, because not only do little moments with our children grow their faith, but it often unexpectedly grows our own (and maybe even more). Again, our children still have some loose expectation that anything is possible, while we, in all our puffed up maturity seem to know better. As more broken life is experienced, the contrast of tender goodness becomes infinitely more shocking to us. It’s often difficult for us to focus on such a fairytale, but we trust. (John 10:4)
Lastly commitment, because we aren’t just told to ask willy nilly, or seek unknowingly, but in Jesus, we get to knock confidently. (John 10:9) I think that’s the best way to characterize good prayer; knocking. Knocking on the life altering Words in scripture. Knocking on the empathetic tales of disaster in scripture. But most importantly, knocking on the promises of scripture. Knocking is the evidence of seeking, the opportunity for asking. The epic conclusion of our intentions and the ominous beginning for our answers. It’s an odd thing knocking on a door, but it becomes increasingly less odd the more you know someone. That’s what we teach our children; to know The Door in which they knock. It may not be on Main St., but they desperately need to know where to go.
If you were to tell me that one of my favorite prayer stories would involve hiccups, I would likely laugh. But it really did illustrate for me how important Matthew 7 is. It’s rare that we get to see prayer answered so quickly, but maybe the reason for that is that we don’t knock enough. I’ve always looked for opportunities to pray with my boys (Lord, please give us a good night rest..), but now I’m eager to teach my boys to knock on The Door (Lord, we need you, you’re our only hope..). Hiccups are one of the mildest obstacles they will likely face, but if they begin to know His Voice in the small things, they will most assuredly know it in the big. And that is the promise in which this dad will forever knock. Lord, You are their only hope.
““Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.”
Matthew 7:7-8
“The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep listen to his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes on ahead of them, and his sheep follow him because they know his voice. But they will never follow a stranger; in fact, they will run away from him because they do not recognize a stranger’s voice.” Jesus used this figure of speech, but the Pharisees did not understand what he was telling them. Therefore Jesus said again, “Very truly I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who have come before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep have not listened to them. I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved. They will come in and go out, and find pasture.”
John 10:3-9
“Start children off on the way they should go, and even when they are old they will not turn from it.”
Proverbs 22:6
