It was an exciting week to live through, watching the development of the trapped miners’ dramatic rescue in Chile.

On the heels of my post last night, I came across this article in Christianity Today. The trapped miners were the springboard for his article. I was heartened to read Galli’s frank questions about prayer, and his conclusions:

First, we are to ask God for things that are important to us, no matter how we feel about God or prayer or the thing prayed for. In Jesus’ theology of prayer, there is no hint that prayer is the way we transcend desire, as if having desire was a sign of spiritual immaturity. Desire is apparently what humans do, something woven into the fabric of our humanity from day one, a divine gift, the first hint that we are made for something outside ourselves, a something that can only be realized by taking the first small step of asking. Prayer is not a way to overcome desire, but the first thing we do with it.

Second, once we announce our desire to God, it’s his job to deal with it. Prayer is not manipulating heaven to fulfill our desires. It’s putting what we desire into the hands of a loving, if inscrutable, God and letting him fulfill it in his time, in his way.