Today I asked God for something selfish.
I have spent the last few years praying for God to call out to the man who broke my heart because I knew that he had once been searching for God and I knew that he had stopped. So, because he was someone I had cared about who’s life I did not get to be part of, I tried praying for him and his relationship with God whenever he filled up my mind. An occurrence that happened less and less as time passed. Still, it happens from time to time, and, as a Christian I believe that is God putting that person on my heart.
This morning I had a conversation with one of the supporters of camp about listening to God. He told me several stories about feeling a nudge from God to pray for people, even one story about calling up a stranger he had read an article about, only to find out twelve years later that he was being nudged to call her and pray for her when she was about to go into a meeting to defend her job and position in her community. An unexpected example of how God works in our lives and how important it is to listen when God asks us to do something, even if it does not make sense.
At the time, it had been a while since I had thought about that particular man who I had felt so much for. There was no reason to even consider that God might ask me to pray over him. Then I got into my car and put on a new album I had downloaded that morning, a whole series of songs I had never listened to before. One came on that was about him. I mean, obviously the song was not actually about him; Taylor Swift doesn’t know my first love. She just gets it. There he was again, a healed over wound concealing a jagged edge.
And I did what I try to do every time he needles his way into my thoughts. I prayed that God would call out to him. I thanked God for being a good shepherd, who goes searching for one lost sheep. I thanked God for being a good employer, thinking of the parable in which the landowner goes out at different hours of the day and asks people to come work in his fields and pays them all the same wage. For being the kind of God who will call out to people no matter how many times they ignore that call.
I wish that had been the end of it. Today it wasn’t.
I pulled into the parking lot of a local coffee shop, getting ready to go borrow their internet to do some work, and opened up my Instagram, uploading a photo to one of the professional pages I help manage, and saw him. His profile was a recommended follow. There he was, stuck in my brain again. A sharp pain in my healed over heart.
By the way, I don’t believe in coincidences. I believe in the law of large numbers and I believe God whispers to us in our quiet moments in many ways.
The question is, what do you do then? What do you pray when God is telling you that you are not finished having someone on your heart? So, I prayed something kind of selfish.
After spending several years praying that God would call out to him and that God would send someone into his life to show him the way God loves him, I prayed that God would let me someday, somehow, be that person.
That is something I know about God. God is the only one who can heal a broken heart and the only one who can fix a broken relationship. God is the only one who mold our hearts. I do not know if my selfish prayer for God to give me a second chance to be the person I was not able to be when my life and that boy’s life collided was the right thing to pray. What I do know is that God was putting him on my heart today, and that God has put him on my heart before for a reason. When that happens, I have to listen. I have to pray for that person. So, I pray for him. I pray that God will call out to him. I pray that God will heal his heart. I pray that God will heal my own heart. I pray that God’s desires will be turned into my desires.
I’m not writing this because I’m not over this person. Most of the time I am. It’s just that sometimes the timeline I live in pulls too close to the one where I did not make certain choices and it reveals the mark that person left on my heart. I believe that God put him in my life on purpose, knowing (as God does, being omnipotent) that he would leave a mark on my heart. I believe that when someone is on your heart, God wants you to pray for them.
I hope someday I get to understand this phenomenon better. Maybe I will pray over this person’s heart for years and never know if those prayers make any difference. It does not matter. Sometimes we have to do something just because God asks it of us.