Savage2Saint Sobriety Dec 1, 2025

I tell you, you can pray for anything, and if you believe that you’ve received it, it will be yours. - Mark 11:24 (NLT).

Trust is such a tricky thing. It's something we demand from everyone, yet we rarely give it to anyone. Throughout our lives, most of us have been lied to, cheated on, talked about, stolen from, and done dirty by the people we trusted the most. The world has taught us one thing for sure: you can't trust just anybody. It's hard to believe without trust. Apart from our ability to love, there is nothing more connected to our hearts and minds than our ability to trust. Our hope is directly connected to our ability to trust and because of that, our willingness to put our faith into people gets less and less with every lie we're told.

As children, we would get so excited for Christmas morning. We trusted in a make-believe character with magical reindeer, who would fly around bringing all of us (who had been good) the presents we had been asking for. The anticipation was more than we could take. We could picture ourselves opening all of the gifts on our wish list. We were alive with hope, but as we got older, our expectations became less and less. We stopped wishing for the moon, because some years we didn't always get what we asked for. When we found out Santa Claus wasn't real, we began questioning everything we thought we knew.

As Christian adults, we carry that same mindset into our prayer life. We make our prayer lists look like a wish list to Santa. When our prayers go unanswered or we're asked to wait on God, we begin to lose hope and begin questioning everything we thought we knew about our Lord and Savior. We set ourselves up for disappointment because we bring our broken life experiences into our new relationship with Jesus. We want the abundant life that Jesus promises us, but we don't always want to put the necessary time and effort into to seeing it through. Instead of post-traumatic stress disorder, we let our past-traumatic trust issues begin to affect our faith in a God who never fails.

Jesus tells us in Mark 11:24, "I tell you, you can pray for anything, and if you believe that you’ve received it, it will be yours." Let's face it, prayer isn't about just asking for anything; it's about trusting God with everything. Prayer is about trusting God to handle the problems we can't solve, provide the necessities we need, and to always be there when we need Him the most. Prayer is where our hope in a Savior overcomes our past experiences. Remember this, when God makes us wait for an answer to our prayers, it's usually because He is either preparing us to receive it, or because He has something altogether better in store for us.

Jesus will always give us the life we need to make it in this fallen world. If we turn our focus away from what we want to how we can use what He's given us to further the work of the Kingdom, we can again have child-like expectations in our prayer life. Instead of being disappointed by a make-believe Santa, we can trust in a very real Lord and Savior named Jesus Christ, who will always hear our prayers and give us exactly what we need. God Bless!