Christians often display a Christmas mentality when presenting their petition prayers. Before the December birthday celebration, people are busy looking for what someone wants for Christmas. Children are eager to share their list of things they would like. Adults, certainly less energetic, will give clues about what they could use. Now wish lists may find their way under the Christmas tree, but there are also some unexpected gifts that surprise the recipient. In fact, the response to the surprise gift may generate more excitement than the expected gift. Many of our prayers are requests that basically refer to our wants and needs. When we receive our response, we express our gratitude and then, almost immediately, we begin to prepare our next request list. To emphasize our needs / wants, we engage others to connect with our prayers to invoke the reality of Matthew 18:19. Answered prayer is a spiritual adrenaline rush. Receiving an answer to prayer is a blessing and an encouragement for spiritual growth.

There is another area of ​​blessings that seems to go unrecognized and that is the area of ​​unsolicited blessings. These are acts of grace that God gives us every day, but we don’t recognize them. For some reason, we tend to see God’s actions as originating solely from our prayers. If we haven’t asked God to intervene, we assume that whatever happens in our life is just a natural path of coincidental experiences. When we walk with the Lord, we will see abundant blessings all around us. When we do not accompany the Lord during our daily routines, our blessing meters will not record His participation in our daily activities. May God be active in our lives and bless us, but we do not recognize his blessings because we are so busy with the sights and sounds of a sinful world. We need to start being aware of God’s daily activities in our lives. Look around you and see the blessings of God, they are everywhere. When we stop centering our lives on ourselves and begin to put God first, we will witness so many blessings that we will think we are on the outskirts of Heaven.

As I look back over the years, I see more and more of God’s role in my life. The things that he had previously thought were just coincidences were actually incidences of God. During my truck days, I experienced life-saving situations that had blocked my own initiatives, when, in truth, they had been God’s intervention. In fact, many of my decisions were directed by God. When I began to realize how active God had been in my life, I was overwhelmed. I remember sitting down and hitting the back button on my memory bank and seeing how God had been involved in my life. All the years that I had spent asking God, while at the same time not witnessing his blessings, made me ask for forgiveness. Witnessing the daily inner action of God in one’s life is a vital part of the growth pattern of believers, just as prayer is a vital part of the believer’s faith. Jesus said that God knows what we need before we even pray. (Matthew 6: 8) What will surprise many believers is that God may have already begun to answer our prayer before it was even spoken. He knows what we are going to ask for and may have already prepared the answer for our observance.

God answers prayers, in addition to blessing us, even if we are not aware of it. As we continue to ask God, let us also praise him for what we are experiencing. Prayer is giving God permission to work in our lives. It is opening our doors for God to work in a requested area in our life. Let’s also open our eyes and see what God is doing. Let’s not be surprised when we receive an unsolicited blessing, because His blessings are all around us, waiting for us to discover them.