I was struggling with a particularly stubborn problem. I’d prayed about it feverishly for several weeks, begging, pleading, but without any results. Then one evening I walked outside to get the paper and found my son Paul, who was a toddler, trying to pull open the petals on a tightly closed rosebud.
He looked up at me wide-eyed and said, “Paul make pretty flower bloom.”
As I heard myself explaining to him that you can’t make a flower bloom by pulling on it, something clicked inside of me. I had been handling my problem the way Paul had handled the rose. By begging, pleading, trying to force an answer, I had been trying to manipulate God.
I needed to take my hands off, wait patiently, and trust in the creative power of God to open up a right answer for me. When the answer did come, it was not what I had expected. It was better. So my interference really had been blocking God’s perfect solution to the problem.
If you’ve been praying about something without results, maybe you need to take your hands off the problem, so God can make a perfect answer bloom.
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