Prayer affords the opportunity for growth

By Daniel Francis

Have you ever prayed and asked God to help you improve something in your life? Maybe you have prayed for more patience, more money to provide for yourself and your family, or even for your family to become closer.
After you asked God for this in prayer, have you noticed that things sometimes get more difficult for some reason? You asked God for more patience and now at every turn, everyone is testing your patience. You wonder why God is doing the opposite of what you asked Him for.

You wanted help improving but God brought you more problems, or did He?

A few months back, I asked God to help me write my new book. It was focused on mindset, and I was having difficulties creating a structure for the book. Without a set structure, I would not be able to write a cohesive book. I prayed for guidance for weeks, but the structure never came.
One day, I was asked to speak at a school, and I always try to say yes to these requests no matter how busy I am, and I was very busy at the time. I wanted to say no, but I went anyway.

I made it to the school, and I was met with a very disheartened group of parents and students. You see, I was asked to give a closing motivational speech to students who were about to start Form One but the principal spoke before me and he spoke to the students as though they were already behaving badly.
I went up to speak and I looked out at the crowd of students who were all essentially over it. So, I levelled with them. I threw out my initial speech idea and rolled with it.

I spoke of my experience coming into school and how lost I was. I spoke about being responsible for myself for the first time in my life. How terrifying and difficult it was but also how freeing it was to chart my path.
While talking, I realised how much the expectations put on me as a child affected me. A student in the crowd shouted out from the back row, “What if I don’t know my path?”
His mother quickly shushed him, but I was glad that he asked that question because that led me to talk about purpose next.

I shared with them the power of understanding your purpose and how it informs the direction of your life. At the end of my speech, I could see a drastic difference in the expressions of the students, and the young boy who had interrupted my speech with his question came up to me after the speech and said that he had somewhat of an idea of what his purpose was thanks to my speech. That one moment made me feel like it was all worth it despite the difficult circumstances.
It was then that I had the idea for the structure of my book. I rushed to my car and jotted down the chapters: Purpose, Belief, Expectation, and Mindset. The guiding notes that came with each chapter flew out of me effortlessly.

Were it not for God providing this interesting situation to me I would not have gotten that necessary nudge to create the structure for my next book.
This is what God does. We pray for patience, and He puts us in situations where we can exercise patience. Why? So that we can develop our patience.
We pray for our family to be closer, so He provides situations where we have an opportunity to offer up an olive branch to the difficult family members. Why? So that we grow closer to our family members. God will not simply drop what you want into your lap.

Learn to align your expectations of prayer with the reality of what God will provide to you. He knows what is best. It is through these trials that we will attain what we want.
We must dispel this idea that God will magically make us better or magically drop what we want into our laps with a little prayer.
You have to give a little for Him to multiply it. You have to grow through walking His trials to attain what you want. Know that on the other side of that work is prosperity. Not only prosperity but prosperity blessed by God.
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Daniel Francis is a millennial helping other millennials. He is a two-time author of the books The Millennial Mind and The Millennial Experience, and an entrepreneur. Over the past four years, he has served as a Personal Development Coach whose work targets Millennials and helps them tap into their full potential. He is also a Self-publishing coach and has guided hundreds on self-publishing their book successfully.

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Email: themillennialmind2020@gmail.com