By Tom Tripp
A husband and wife were driving through Texas when they observed a tornado heading toward them. In fright, they pulled the car off to the side of the road, got out and lay down in a rut near the car. As they lay there, the twister turned away and veered off across a field then hit and demolished a small wooden house. The couple hurried to where the tornado had struck. The house now consisted of little more than kindling wood and a hole in the ground. When the couple looked into the hole, they saw an old man holding tightly to a piece of timber, his eyes close tightly. The woman called down to him, “Sir, are you all right?” The old man opened his eyes, looked around cautiously, and said, “I guess so.”
The woman asked, “Was there anyone with you?” The old man replied, “Just me and God, and we were having an urgent conversation!”
The man was engaged in what may be called an “Uh-oh Prayer.” It’s the kind of prayer we pray when we find ourselves in some kind of a mess (“Uh-oh”), and we beg God to get us out of the mess.
Sadly, I recognize that many of my prayers get stuck only at the “Uh-oh” level – merely asking God to get me out of one mess or another.
The prophet Habakkuk found himself in quite a mess, with all kinds of things going wrong around him. Things are going horribly in his nation, and the future looks more discouraging. Near the end of his book, he summarizes how bad things are: “Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls….” (Habakkuk 3:17).
I would have expected that what would come next would be a prayer like my typical “Uh-oh Prayers”: “God, get me out of this mess.”
But Habakkuk reaches higher than a mere “Uh-oh Prayer.” Habakkuk leads with trust in God despite the circumstances. He prays, “Yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Savior. The Sovereign Lord is my strength; He makes my feet like the feet of a deer; He enables me to go on the heights” (Habakkuk 3:18-19).
Habakkuk does not ask merely for God to get him out of the mess. He focuses, instead, on God’s presence with him through it all and on God’s ability to equip Habakkuk with what he needs to get through the difficulties: the feet of a deer to maneuver through the rocky times ahead.
About those feet, Ray Vander Laan remarks, “Negotiating the rugged mountains, deep canyons, and rocky ground of the Judea Wilderness is hard, dangerous work. The graceful ibex, however, are able to move with little effort on nearly impossibly steep trails at hazardous heights. They can do this because God, their Creator, gave them a soft hoof that grips the rock without slipping.”
That’s what Habakkuk focused on: Not a request for easier circumstances but that God could give to him what he needed to be able to negotiate the troubles that surrounded him.
What a better person I might be if that would become the content of my prayers!
Phillips Brooks expresses it well: “Do not pray for easy lives; pray to be stronger men and women. Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers, but pray for powers equal to your tasks. Then the doing of your work shall be no miracle, but you shall be a miracle. Every day you shall wonder at yourself – at the richness of life which has come to you by the grace of God.”
An unknown person prayed, “Dear God, enlighten what’s dark in me, strengthen what’s weak in me, mend what’s broken in me, bind what’s bruised in me, and, lastly, revive whatever peace and love has died
in me.” H
