Pray and work

Just a quote I reread the other day that I really love: "Here is the secret of great success: Work with all your might, but don't trust in the least in your work. Pray with all your might for the blessing of God, but work at the same time with all diligence, all patience, and all perseverance. Pray then and work. Work and pray. And still again pray, and then work. And so on all the days of your life. The result will surely be abundant blessing." George Mueller

So convicting and so true! Work and pray. Pray and work. But the prayer must always come first and foremost. John Bunyan put it this way: "You can do more than pray after you've prayed, but you can't do more than pray until you've prayed." How often we do the complete antithesis of this--get busy, get frenetic, get focused on every possible solution we can think of and then, eventually, we remember to pray. Or we pray after everything else seems to be failing. The result invariably is burnout, frustration, exhaustion, or irritation. Again, it comes back to remembering! We've got to train ourselves to stop and pray first. We have to remember to seek the Lord's guidance and enabling before we get busy with all our efforts and ideas. But then we go after it with all our hearts and trust the results up to Him.

Okay, waaaaaaaay easier said than done! But nobody ever said the Christian life would be a cakewalk. G. K. Chesteron once wrote that "Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; rather it has been tried and found difficult." Are we willing to do the hard thing or do we just want to float along in the world's easy current? Are we willing to roll up the sleeves of our minds and choose to renew our minds in God's Word daily and then act upon what we are reading or do we just want to drift along, absorbed in our supercharged schedules and oftentimes mindless activity? I've learned I can be awfully busy without being one bit fruitful. I can look and feel like I'm getting a lot accomplished and crossed off my to-do list, but all the while, like Martha, I'm missing out on the "one thing needful" with the result that my soul feels malnourished and listless.

Help me, Lord, to seek You first and foremost; to pray, to continually feast and graze on Your Word, but then to get busy with wherever You have placed me and whatever You have given me to do. To pray with all my heart and then work with all my heart--and all to Your glory. Then the laundry, the cooking, the carpooling, the cleaning become infused with the sacred and the eternal. Brother Lawrence, the monk in a monastery's kitchen many years ago, explained that whatever he was doing, he would do it to the glory of God. If he was peeling potatoes, he would do it to the glory of God and while doing it, he would "practice the presence" of knowing God was right there with him. What a difference when I know that God is with me as I straighten up my messy house for the thousandth time and that I can do it to His glory to the best of my ability. Work and pray; pray and work--and He is pleased. All to His glory alone.