God’s Giving Is Wiser Than Our Asking

Copyright © 2007¹

Chapter 5 of the book
Boyhood Memories & Lessons
by
Isaiah Reid

This article is also available in the complete paperback version.

I HAD GENERAL CONFIDENCE before I had definite trust or was able to ex­ercise a rational faith. I never remember a time when I doubted either the existence or character of God, the authority and veracity of the Bible, or the person, character, office, and work of our Lord Jesus Christ. Nor did I ques­tion the general plan of salvation. How valuable the early teach­ing, early train­ing, and life in a religious family! Ah! that old log meet­ing house on the hill! fWhat rays of influence went out from it! Where will their lengthening lines cease their ongoing or light-giv­ing? Those fam­ily altars—when will their fires ever burn down? Those sweet old consecrated Sabbaths, when will their now-silent influences cease their stir on the heart? How the old memory-links of childhood and early boyhood hold the life of later years in safekeeping like anchors to a ship.

The bees, working on the Sabbath as on any other day—they never fell, and all days and all work to them are an eternal Sunday—may not have hummed a sweeter music then than now, but it has always seemed that they did. The redbird that used to call so continuously from the trees below the garden of a rainy morning may make as sweet notes still, but memory holds a richness of the note I do not now catch. The robin, mockingbird, and oriole may have as good a program for mating and nesting season now as then, but how rich then were the morning ori­sons, the after­noon matinees, and the evening cantatas! Memory links their richness and rounded fullness and uplifting of life even at the present time with a thrill of delight. That going to church of a sweet May morning, say, just af­ter a nice shower during the night! How fresh the new-made day—every­thing clean-washed for Sunday. The flowers never were sweeter. The trees never looked grander. Earth and sky never seemed so near together. So great was the sense of the nearness of God; so full of everything the senses seemed of the unseen and eternal! One did not want to think of the cornfield and the weekday work.

In some quiet nook it was always worship sufficient just to sit down and let the praise-service of the “things that are made”² go on undisturbed by any human program. The “bobwhite” of the faraway quail seem­ed as full of hope and good cheer, and so utterly void of anything but that which is pure, as if an angel had just tossed over the glory walls of heaven a single note such as they sing there. Then there was the smell of the fresh­ly mois­tened soil, and the balm of the air distilling from millions of burst­ing buds and opening flowers, with the breeze wafting incense from na­ture’s censers far surpassing any human compounds floating in the dusty chambers of some man-built temple! The giant trees pillared this temple of nature; the great canopy of leaves and festoons of vines were the swaying curtains as the King of Glory passed through. The bird orches­tra, the deeper, faraway threnody of the treetops, and the silver mur­mur of the rippling brook held the lone worshiper far closer to nature’s God than mitered priest, surpliced choir, and bowing saints clothed in all the world’s attempts to imitate nature either in uttered praise or earth­ly gar­ni­ture.

Even the trill of the invisible cicadae in their leafy treetop temple, or the string band of the grasshoppers with their simple, strident, reiterative tune on a bright Sabbath morning, had more in it to lift the soul heavenward than much of the so-called quartet music one so often hears where there is naught save a series of yelling set to music. Coming out of the deep, dark woods at the gateway opening into the old churchyard, we always found this grasshopper chorus at the proper season. With none in the woods, the change always struck me forcibly as we went from the gate to the church. It was mainly over on the cemetery side of the enclosure, and whether that gave shaping to thought or not, I always felt it as peculiarly sacred, unworldly, and somehow indissolubly connected with the holy Sabbath. As I listened, I thought every grasshopper did his very best, and then, while they all tried again, none were discouraged or out of time and tune. So they kept on and on in the bright sunlight, while the flowers bloomed, the trees clapped their hands³ and the birds continued their varied chorales; and while our poor Psalm-singing floated out of open windows and doors, repeating itself from the echoing architraves⁴ of the forest’s boundless recesses.

I did not pray as much then as now, and yet I see there was much real praying. Though it was not recognized, there was then a fixed habit of referring almost everything to God—that attitude of mind we call “praying always.”⁵ We go a little way, and can’t go any farther, and then refer all to God. In my mind God was active all about me bringing things to pass. What was done beyond man’s power, He was doing. He was ever in that world which succeeded this to which man was going. He was to do things for us which we could not do for ourselves, here as well as there. There was a kind of general blind trust in God, and yet, as the sense of unlikeness to Him and unworthiness were realized, there grew up a kind of fear of Him. This did not destroy faith in His power, character, or government, and yet somehow the sense of His watching and marking sins against me almost wholly overshadowed the proper sense of His love and favor.

Later, when the sense of being unable to obtain what my heart most wanted pressed on me, I would, in a way, ask God for it, long before I un­der­stood the nature of prayer, or that God knew better what I needed than I did in asking. I see now I asked Him oftentimes for that which He could not let me have, and which I should not and did not receive. His giv­ing was wiser than my asking. Perhaps all our appeals to Him are heard, and no one going to Him and believing He is abundantly able and will­ing to sup­ply all our needs is ever denied, though He gives not the exact thing we ask, but that which is better, in its place. It may be it is better to say He gives us the real answer to the desire in our heart. We thought the thing we asked for was what would satisfy us, but He saw it would not, and in answer gave us that which would.

At one time I wanted to be a worker in wood. God frustrated all our plans and made me a worker among souls.⁶ How much better to shape souls “carved after the similitude of a palace,”⁷ than in a dusty shop to shape wood into useful and beautiful forms! How much better with pen and voice to build temples for the Great God of heaven than to be able to hammer nails, saw boards, or frame timbers, though there is nothing whatever wrong in so doing when God calls that way. The way I wanted to go was not wrong, but God’s way was better. His giving was wiser than my asking.

In later years more or less of the same goes on, for men are but children of an older growth and wider experience. How many times that which my heart was set on, not being a wrong thing, or denied of God, or forbidden in the natural order of things, and so a subject of prayer, has utterly failed of realization! Must I conclude God does not hear prayer? No. He hears, but answers in His own wisdom, not ours. We know the cry of our hearts when we do not know the real answer to that cry. We are like children, crying because we are hungry, and asking for candy and ice cream, when we most need a glass of milk and plain bread and butter.

God hears the cry of the heart more than the words of the lips or the hu­man judgment of what would satisfy the want in the heart. God answers the prayer of the heart much as Jesus answered the questions of men, dealing directly with the inward prompting and motive rather than the vocal expression. He never fails to hear real prayer. He always answers in His own wise way.

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