I was an 18 year old college Freshman and I was sitting on a rock looking out over a lake. I had started to come to this spot on a weekly basis to contemplate life, even pray occasionally in my very immature way. My life was good, I had great friends, great parents. I was attending a college that was the perfect size and environment for my own mentality. But I was lonely.
I had never had a girlfriend and my quiet and kinda serious persona was not conducive to making the kind of impression needed to change that. I thought I had a lot to offer in a relationship but I just had never really had the chance to show that side of me. So, on that rock, I prayed that God would send me a girl that I could be close to, someone that I could share something unique and special.
My whole life, my prayers have had a tendency to be a little generic. They go something like, “Lord, I pray for my time at work today, may you be present.” There was nothing generic about my prayer that evening on the rock overlooking the lake. I don’t know what I was expecting and I didn’t know if this prayer would even be answered but I was lonely and I sought God’s specific help.
Six days later, I am in the cafeteria when a girl comes up to me and asks if I was going to church that night. Apparently, her and I went to the same church occasionally. I had seen her around but we had never had a conversation up until that point. I stated that I wasn’t going to church that night and the conversation ended abruptly. I didn’t think much of it.
The next afternoon, as I am in the Student Center watching a baseball game, this same girl sits down in the opposite chair and starts talking to me again. This time, we have a real conversation and she seems nice and has a wonderful smile. Thankfully the conversation was long enough for me to start running the reel of memory back through my mind. This is the same girl who approached me the night before and now she has come out of nowhere to speak to me again. Then I remembered the prayer and it hit me that something bigger may be going on here. So I asked, “I was planning on going out to the lake tonight, do you want to go with me?”
One week to the day of my prayer, I was sitting on that same rock looking over the same lake but this time their was a pretty girl next to me as we talked about our lives and marveled in a moment that doesn’t happen everyday.
I can’t promise you that all prayers for girlfriends will be answered or prayers for new jobs or money to pay off that debt. All I can tell you is this happened to me and that God answered my prayer. There have been many times when my prayers didn’t get answered so quickly or obviously or even the way that I wanted them to. But, I always have the reference point of God working in strange ways to answer my prayer and to do his will.
Oh, and I also have the daily reminder of this answered prayer in my beautiful wife, Leah. December 27 will be our 19th wedding anniversary.
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