I wonder what experiences you have of your prayers being answered? Or of miracles?
Have you had help or guidance... what form did it take?
Thank you.
Everyday, I am faced with the impulse to be selfish and fleshly in my living and everyday the Holy Spirit convicts me when I am and, as I submit to His will and way, leads me into the holy, self-sacrificing life he wants me to live. This happens when I'm interacting with my wife, when I'm driving my car, when I'm just sitting around thinking. My wife will want something of me in an "inconvenient" moment, a moment when I have something else I want to do, but when I turn to God in submission in such a moment, I am moved easily toward my wife in sacrifice of what I want. When someone drives dangerously or selfishly, cutting me off abruptly in traffic, or slamming on their brakes to turn without warning, or blasting their horn in impatience, if I yield to God when the temptation to respond in fleshly anger arises, reminding myself of who I am in Christ, my annoyance dissolves, replaced by the patience and peace of God. When I'm laying in bed at night, moving toward sleep, and my thoughts wander into imaginings that I know are not pleasing to God, if I surrender myself to God, placing my imagination under His control, my thoughts immediately center upon Him, moving away from the darkness of selfish, carnal thinking as a result and often into prayer or ruminations on His truth instead.
More dramatically, God has provided jobs, vehicles, money, and avenues to better health as I have asked Him for these things. He has done so in ways that mark very clearly that He has: precise timing, specificity of supply, evident arrangement of supply before prayer was made, unalloyed blessing and abundance in His supply (no hidden downside), and so on. For example, when I was a teenager (I'm in my fifties now), I was invited by my Dad to go deer hunting. I was excited to engage in this "rite of passage" of sorts toward full manhood.
The evening before we were to take up the hunt, my Dad got a call from a friend who was going to join us, informing my Dad that we would all have to be wearing neon-orange or bright-red coveralls. My Dad's friend had coveralls for himself and my Dad, but none for me. I was seriously disappointed. I could not go without coveralls and we had no means of obtaining a pair before the hunt began at sunrise the next morning.
My Dad urged me to talk to God about the situation and ask Him to provide a pair of coveralls. Initially, I thought this was a silly suggestion. Why would God bother about such a thing? But, I realized I had nothing to lose and, perhaps, God would provide what I needed. I had no idea how He'd do so, though. I prayed, feeling a bit foolish in the process.
An hour passed and no one came to the door of our home with coveralls, no phone rang with someone offering a pair, no divine supply was made whatever. I resigned myself to not going on the hunt.
Around 9:30 p.m. or so, my Dad reminded me to take the two bags of garbage sitting on our back porch to the garbage bins in the alley behind our home. It was early winter but the ground was already covered with snow and the temperature was around -20 celsius. Being a teenager, I snatched up the bags and darted, coatless, in slippers, across the backyard to the alley. Motivated by the cold, I dumped the bags as fast as I could in the bin and turned to race back to the house. In the moonlight, my eye caught sight of something sticking up out of the packed snow and ice of the alley. Why I stopped my run for the warmth of the house to kick at it is a mystery (if God wasn't involved). But kick at it I did and in short order uncovered - you guessed it - a pair of bright-red coveralls.
The coveralls were washed that night and I wore them hunting with my Dad the next day.
This is, of course, a very mundane, very small, instance of God's provision but it was clearly something God did, I believe.
I have many stories of this sort of thing, God doing for me as He has promised to do in His word.
Your religious status says "Buddhist," and my friend, I think you can somewhat relate to what I am saying. Some understand God to be an actual entity, while others understand it as a human analogy of "that," beyond all conceptualization ("neti neti").
