I was reading my Bible just before going to bed the other night.... blind Bartimaeus was sitting at the gate and heard that Jesus was coming by. He was calling out to Jesus, ‘Son of David... have mercy on me’. Jesus heard Bartimaeus and stopped in his tracks. He then asked Bartimaeus ‘What do you want?’...
I felt challenged as I read that story. How many times do my prayers stop Jesus to take notice of what I am saying? And ‘What do I want?’
I also began to question myself... do I actually ask Jesus for exactly what I want? I have lots of dreams and desires in my heart but do I actually voice them enough in my prayers so that Jesus takes notice? Obviously Jesus already knew what Bartimaeus wanted because He could see that he was blind... so why did He ask him ‘What do you want?’
Jesus wants us to ask Him for what we want even though He may already know the desires of our heart. There is that other Scripture that says ‘You have not because you ask not’.
The next day we had a guest speaker in our staff meeting and he spoke about several things but he also spent a little bit of time on this same story. I was flabbergasted!! Obviously God is trying to tell me something! Perhaps I need to get on my knees more often and ask Jesus for what I want.
James 4:2 You want what you don’t have, so you scheme and kill to get it. You are jealous of what others have, but you can’t get it, so you fight and wage war to take it away from them. Yet you don’t have what you want because you don’t ask God for it.
Every now and again I am absolutely stunned at how quickly life can pass by, often without us barely even noticing and last night was one of those times... My husband Craig and I celebrated with one of our friends who turned 40 years old today. I honestly cannot believe I have friends who are that age and that I too have almost reached that point in life... the dreaded top of the hill! However, aren’t they now saying that 40 is the new 30?? What a relief!!
I remember when my mother had her 40th birthday and we had a huge surprise party for her... I was sixteen at the time and everyone else who was my mum’s age and my mother of course... seemed SO old. It kind of shocks me to think that I was there to celebrate with my mum when I myself who has only about 15 months to go haven’t even started a family yet!
But along with celebrating with our friend the big 40... yesterday he also buried his friend of many years who was a similar age... that is most certainly a wake-up call to me of how short life can be.
All of this rolled into one definitely makes you reflect again on your own life... my achievements, successes, failures, opportunities taken or missed... but it also encourages me to ensure that in the coming years I take every opportunity that I possibly can and strive that little bit harder to achieve all of those goals and dreams that I have in my heart.
Life is beautiful and a God-given gift but often life can be short or it can pass by so quickly that it comes and goes without a blink because we can be so busy doing EVERYTHING but I want to be one who will ‘seize the day’ and make the most of my life, live my life to the full with purpose and do God’s will for my life... because we have only one life to live on this earth... and I want to make it count!
Proverbs 19:21 Many are the plans in a man's heart, but it is the LORD's purpose that prevails.
