| Secrets of a Beautiful Life |
Chapter 14 |
Page 4 |
But there are other prayers that really are not answered. God is silent to us when we ask. Yet there is a reason for His silence — it is better we should not have the things we want and plead for. For example, we ask God to lift away our burdens. But to do this would rob us of blessing of the burden, and our Father loves us too well to give us present ease at the cost of future and eternal good. There are mistaken notions current about the way God promises to help us. People think that whenever they have a little trouble or a bit of hard path to go over, a load to carry, a sorrow to meet, or a trail of any kind, all they have to do is call upon God, and He will at once deliver them, take away the sorrow that threatens, free them from the trial. They think that is what God promises. They imagine that when anything goes a little wrong with them, all they have to do is pray, and God will set it right. But this is not the manner of God’s love. His purpose concerning us is not to make things easy for us, but to make something of us.
So when we pray to God to save us from all care, to take the struggles out of our life, to make the paths mossy, to lift away all loads, He simply will not do it. It would be most unloving in Him to do so. Prayers of this kind, therefore, go unanswered. We must carry the burden ourselves. God wants us to learn life’s lessons, and to do this we must be left to work out the problems for ourselves. There are rich blessings that can be gotten only in sorrow. It would be a short-sighted love, indeed, that would heed our cries and spare us from the sorrow because we cried for this, thus depriving us of the wonderful blessings which can be gotten only in the sorrow.
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