Oftentimes when people greet one another, they’ll ask “how is life?” and depending on who’s asking, we are usually brutally honest or just give a more generic response. But what this can hopefully encourage us to do is ask ourselves this very question because it helps us come to an awareness that perhaps wasn’t there before.
So, how is your life? How has your life been? When you look back at it, do you mainly remember the pain in it or do you see the highlighted glimpses of God’s faithfulness throughout it? The truth is many of our lives have been hard, painful, or traumatic, and what is also true is that our life has also included the goodness of God throughout the entirety of it. And because we know this, then we can determine that overall life is good—not because everything works out within it but because we know the One working all things together for our good.
Within this good life, there is something else to consider—God’s faithful love. His faithful love pierces through our pain. His faithful love fills us up toward flourishing. His faithful love never leaves or negates us. His faithful love is steadfast, present, and continuous. Therefore, when we pray to God and communicate with others about Him—the words that come out of our mouths get to be praise because in the best seasons of life, His faithful love has been present in obvious ways, and in the lowest seasons of life, His faithful love is what has sustained us.
So our lips glorify Him for who He has always been, and our prayers speak a testimony of a thousand miracles we have witnessed and received. Because His faithfulness has never and will never be a result of how bad or good our life is going, how bad or good we are being, or how bad or good the world is functioning. No, His faithfulness is rooted in His love. And because that is true, we can trust His faithfulness even when our faith is fickle.
This is why prayer is essential in our life. Without it, we lose our sense of connection to the source that gives us life and makes it good. And the truth is, if you feel like your life isn’t really that good by your definition of what “good” is, even that is something you can confess and share with the Lord and ask Him to give you hope in the midst of your pain. So that your lips don’t have to glorify Him out of legalism or feeling like you have to because that’s what a “good” Christian would do, but rather from a place living a “despite” kind-of-life. One that is aware of our realities and circumstances and despite that—our lips glorify Him. This is another reason why we pray, to remember. To remember He has been true, loving, graceful, kind, and steadfast. So whenever we pray, we are reminded of what is true. Him.
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