As a journalism student, I learned the questions a journalist should answer when preparing a story.
Who? What? Why? When? Where? and How?
Ironically, these are the exact questions we should not ask when going before God in prayer, asking for his help in our lives.
When we pray, we often dictate to God the answers to these questions. We describe what needs to happen and then ask him to deliver, instead of placing everything in his hands and saying “Thy will be done.”
In the Old Testament, the stories of Nahum and his leprosy, Sarah and her impatience about having a child, the Israelites impatience with Moses and God working through him, and Amnon’s plan to get Tamar to sleep with him, all suggest we need to patiently respect God’s timing and his holy and true will.
In the New Testament, the Apostles constantly questioned Jesus, seeking answers to questions about what he would do and when, even though they saw and knew all he could do as the Son of God, as God himself.
Praying with a faithful expectancy tempered by patience is what we should be doing and what God expects of us. But it should be an open-ended expectancy, one in which we surrender to the ultimate journalist who has already answered all the questions, written our story, and published it.
