On March 4th, I started maternity leave in preparation for the arrival of baby number 3. After a debilitating pregnancy where, due to 24/7 morning sickness for the better part of 40 weeks, our little family unit went into survival mode, the end was finally in sight. And along with it, NORMALITY.
On March 17th Moro worked his last day before paternity leave (forced evacuation of baby was booked for March 18th). Everything in the office was business as usual when he left, aside from talk of computers being dropped to our place whilst he was off as it was likely that everyone would be working from home by the time he returned. #covid19
On March 18th baby Beau arrived, and what a great day it was (bar the labour part, cheers for that Eve).
On March 19th Moro’s boss dropped by the hospital where, through tears in the hospital car park, he advised Moro that he had been made redundant along with 60% of the company. The impacts of COVID had caused several major clients to ‘turn off the tap’, forcing the company to take drastic and immediate action.
After having a genuine laugh about how ridiculous and surreal the whole situation was, the overriding feeling in the moments that followed was not so much worry, but sadness. We knew we would be OK (though we had no idea how), but the sense of loss was real. Moro loved his job, the place he had within his team, the relationships he had built with his colleagues and the opportunities for professional growth afforded to him.
We were discharged from hospital early-evening and on route home realised we didn’t really know what to pray, other than for provision. Whilst chatting it through, God bought to mind our rented flat in Brighton.
Bare with me here….
It was a beautiful one bedroom, open plan, a light-filled apartment that even had a breakfast bar. It was old and full of character on the outside but freshly renovated on the inside - old meets new in the best possible way. But the best bit about it was the way it came to be ours. At that point in our lives we had been reading and learning a lot about praying specific prayers, about God giving us desires that we might then seek Him for their fulfilment, about there being nothing too bold, too big or conversely too insignificant to pray specifically for and about. So we put theory into practice and prayed for everything we wanted in a flat and the flat described above is everything we prayed for, right down to the breakfast bar.
A year or so later, the owner decided to sell. We were gutted, we loved the home we created there, but such is the life of renters. So we boxed up our stuff, put it in storage while we went away (the end of our tenancy coincided nicely with a month or so of travel), and we figured we’d find our next flat when we got back.
While praying for a new place, we found ourselves essentially praying for our old flat. Needless to say, before we found somewhere else our landlord (who we had stayed in touch with) shared that she had decided to not sell and was putting the place back on the rental market… naturally we moved right back in.
It was off the back of this (great) story that we decided to pray quite simply that Moro would get his job back.
On March 20th, about 24 hours after we started praying this prayer, Moro’s boss called and told him to rip up his redundancy papers, he was back in.
Obviously, prayer is far more than asking for things, and to reduce it to a merely transactional activity would be our loss on so many levels. But bringing your requests to the God who hears is definitely part of it. And if you’re going to bring your wants and needs and dreams than why not make them specific? Why not search your heart for what we actually need, want or dream? Chances are God put it in your heart to start with, and if He didn’t, then your prayer will likely start changing shape as you begin to petition heaven anyway. Doing so requires courage; it forces you to search yourself to work out what you ACTUALLY want. It also requires vulnerability as once you work out what it is that’s in your heart you then need to ‘put yourself out there’ before God.
Of course, not all of our prayers have been answered in the way we would have hoped (nor so efficiently), and we’ve definitely got a big bank of “no or not yet’ answers. That said our testimony is that through praying specifically our prayers have been refined, our faith levels have increased and whatever the outcome has been, God has been present and remained faithful.
