Unlike Amazon, God Doesn't Promise Next-Day Delivery
My Week in Review
WHY READ THIS? History shows that your prayers may be answered later and differently than you want.
Does God seem tardy in answering your prayers? If your answer is yes, welcome to the not-so-exclusive club called the human race, where prayer comes with no senior discounts or promises of next-day delivery.
Your prayer may be for a no-brainer of a good cause, maybe for a hoped-for child, a trustworthy friend to talk to, a steady job to pay the mortgage or elusive good health after a life in chronic pain.
All good stuff. These requests make common sense. If I were God I’d deliver them to you with same-day delivery.
But I’m not and you’re running out of patience. You wait and wait and wait, like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and many others over age 50 have done throughout history.
A few things to remember:
God did hear your prayer
He keeps his promises
He isn’t Amazon
A Week of Unanswered Prayers for me
I thought about God’s perplexing timing this week as I learned I did not get the job I applied for, as my retirement plans changed with the stock market plummeting and as I enhanced (rewrote) my article about FDR for my series, “Remarkable Triumphs After 50.”
By now, you may know the polio story of our 32nd president, even though it was hidden from the American public for years.
At the robust age of 39, Roosevelt couldn't move his legs. I could find no prayers from FDR himself that he would be healed, but he no doubt asked.
Like many Americans of that time, his beliefs were simple, according to the biography The Simple Faith of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, by Christine Wicker.
He believed the God who heard his prayers and answered them. He believed God expected him to serve others. He anchored his faith in biblical stories and teachings.
As time passed, he also dreamed of healing himself and thousands of others paralyzed by polio. He built the nation's first polio rehab center at Warm Springs, Georgia. At 56, FDR started the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis.
Kids nationwide gave coins from their allowance, calling it "The March of Dimes."
Roosevelt died in 1945 at age 63. If he prayed that he could walk, that prayer was not answered in his lifetime.
God did Eradicate Polio Through FDR — Later
However … ten years after his death, Dr. Jonas Salk, funded by the March of Dimes, created the first successful polio vaccine. What FDR couldn't achieve with exercise, Salk accomplished with an injection – ending polio as America's leading cause of disability.
So what’s my point?
Your prayers may be answered “late,” maybe even after you die, and they may look much different from what you imagined. But they were heard, according to Psalm 34:4 — “I sought the LORD, and he answered me; he delivered me from all my fears.”
The inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt as the 32nd president was held on Saturday, March 4, 1933. He famously began his inaugural speech this way:,
So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is...fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. — FDR
Let’s Keep Praying and Waiting
God heard FDR’s petition. He didn’t heal his legs, but he did heal a nation in anxiety to a country seemingly without fear.
That doesn’t mean FDR was OK with not walking. Historians say he got so low he became depressed at times, which is understandable.
“Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life” (Proverbs 13:12, NIV).
Keep praying, my friends. Don’t lose heart. You’re not done yet and your best is still ahead.
God hears us and WILL answer even if we don’t see the answer ourselves.