We are not immune.

When we pray for peace, what does that mean?

When we pray for protection, for healing, for God to bless us… what are we really praying for?

When we say “Lord, thy will be done,” how often do we try to define what that should look like?

I think sometimes “answered prayers” can be equated to “this worked out the way I hoped it would.” And I think we need to take caution in attributing physical health, material wealth, and worldly comforts to God’s will for us.

When hard times come, when people get sick or die, when we lose our jobs, our homes, our families… does that mean God is no longer answering prayers? That God’s will can’t be done unless we are happy, healthy, and comfortable? It might be easy to look at someone else’s tragedy and think, “maybe they didn’t pray enough…” “God is punishing them…” or, “I can protect myself and my family from that if I just have strong enough faith.”

People all over the world deal with hard times. Unbelievably hard times. Children lose their parents. Parents lose their children. Reading through the Bible is story after story after story of wars, illness, death. Reading through world history books, the same. Lately, the news has been reminding us of plagues and pandemics from years past. These things happened. To real people, just like you and me. People who worked and had families and maybe went to church and prayed. We are not immune to difficult times. We are not promised tomorrow. We are not guaranteed a comfortable or perfect life. But we are promised something better, if we put our trust in Jesus.

We can’t control what happens to us in life. We can’t control what will happen to our friends, our parents, or our kids. We can control how we approach the situations in front of us and we can control who or what we choose to put our faith in.