The other morning, I had the rare opportunity to drive my 15-year-old daughter, Whitney, to school. It was great to be able to spend a little time with her one on one without distractions or interruptions, just to find out what was going on in her life.
I knew she had been doing the student version of Experiencing God in her youth Bible study at church. So i asked her what she thought God was saying to her. I expected her to kind of think for a bit but to my surprise she answered right away: "I think God wants me to trust Him and not get stressed out so much in my life." Wow, I thought, my little girl is all growed up and hearing from God!
We talked for a while about what causes stress and I gave her my theory about why we stress out. I think I covered it here in an earlier post but the Cliff Notes version is basically this: We wake up every day with a set of expectations for the day -- things we expect to accomplish, the way we expect our day to go, how we expect things to work, etc. Stress happens when our day doesn't happen the way we expected. There is a tension between what we expect and what God actually gives us and that tension is called stress.
The way to avoid it, I told Whitney, would be to wake up and the very first thing you do would be to take all your expectations for the day and hand them over to God in prayer. Phillipians 4:6-7 says, "Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done. Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus." NLT
We began to talk about prayer, about what it is and what it is not. So many people treat prayer like it's a way to get what they want from God. They see it as a way to get God on their agenda, to meet their expectations. Rather, I told her, prayer is how we get on God's agenda, how we catch His heart and make it ours. It's how we sync our lives to God, I said. And that's when it hit me.
Suddenly in my mind's eye, I saw an iPod attached to a computer by that little cable. "Whitney," I said, "think about syncing your iPod to the computer. Let's say the computer represents God and the iPod is you. You want everything on the computer's library to be on your iPod, until it mirrors exactly what is stored on the computer. Now that little cable that connects the iPod to the computer is prayer. It is through that connection that you will be synced to God, He will download Himself into you, until you mirror Him exactly. Then as you go through your day, you are taking everything God is around inside you."
I don't know which one of us got more out of that illustration but she seemed to like it. Since that morning, though, that image of syncing my life to God's heart through prayer has been stuck in my head. Have you "synced" yourself to God today?
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