Two New Prayer Thoughts

Yesterday I had cause to plead earnestly in prayer to God, and as I did so, two "new" thoughts came to my mind.

• I did not want to pray for "resolve"; I wanted to pray for God's Spirit/Power within me.

If I decide to do something, that is Me doing; but if I have the Power of God within me, if his Spirit is my spirit, mingled, intertwined, then it is God doing it.

It makes no sense to pray to God that I would make my own decision and resolve; it makes sense that I would tell God about it, but not to ask him to "help" me to do it, unless, of course, he's actually involved in helping.

When I ask for help from God, I'm really asking for his Spirit to be active within me, not just for me to resolve to do something myself.

• I wanted to pray to "be a Man".

I wasn't praying to be a bully, or to "take control", or to ignore the needs of others; I was praying to not be passive-aggressive, to not be a whiner.

I tend to be a peace-maker; I want people to be gentle with each other; I'm a great believer in trying to "walk in the other person's shoes", to understand their perspective and their needs and wants, and to be self-sacrificial in meeting those needs/wants.

But I also have needs/wants, and sometimes in being self-sacrificial, I wind up stuffing my own needs/wants, and all that does is allow those needs/wants to simmer beneath the surface. This passiveness of mine eventually erupts in a moment of greater need/want, and I become aggressive, but in an unhealthy way.

The better solution is to "be a Man"; to hear the other person's perspective/needs/wants, but to also express my own perspective/needs/wants, rather than simply stuffing them to deal with them later. (And I need to express them in a manly manner, not in a simpering, whiny way.)

Already I've written way more words on these two issues than what is justified by my as-yet limited understanding of what either of them really mean, but I sense that both of these prayer thoughts are important, and wanted to get them written down in some form before they fall out of my memory/consciousness.