Out Of The Mouths Of Babes...Or Teen-agers

Let me just take a few sentences here to say how much I absolutely love my high schoolers, all of them, not just the seven many of us have been praying for over the past three years. These are an amazing group of kids who really do love God and really do work on building a growing and thriving relationship with Him. My homeroom class has 11 students in it. Four days a week I have the privilege of having devotions with them. On Fridays, they each share something they learned from God that week and they all have something to share. A lot of the times it is something they have learned in chapel that week or in their respective churches, but many times I hear, "while I was reading in my Bible..." or "during my devotions, God showed me..." How sweet to hear these kids are choosing to spend time with God, on their own, outside of school. I love to hear what they have to say, and occasionally, God uses one of them to challenge or help me as was the case recently.
     One of the boys had been reading about prayer. He has a dog that he loves very much. Several months ago it was diagnosed with cancer and not given long to live. He said he and his family have been praying for the animal ever since. Recently, they took her in to the vet who told the family he was shocked the animal was still alive. Animals with her type of cancer do not live long and he couldn't believe she had lived three months longer than he had originally given the family. Of course the boy attributed that to their family prayers. He told his classmates that they needed to believe God's promises for answered prayers because God had answered his family's request. Okay, so you may be thinking what I was thinking then, this is an animal, when it dies, it goes into the ground and that's it, but the boy was right about God's promises.
     There is something I have been praying about for a few weeks, something, that in the grand scheme of eternity, really doesn't matter, it's just a desire of my heart. I've been reading in James, always a dangerous thing to do, about prayer requests and why they often go unanswered. I've read these verses I don't know how many times in my life, but God shed some new light on a few of them in particular. One, often we don't have things because we don't ask. Often, I want to ask God for something and then think, nah, it's selfish, God won't answer that, but my student asked God for the life of his pet and God answered. The verse following says that often when we do actually ask, we don't get what we ask for because we only want it for our own selfish pleasure. God has really been working on me about why I pray for what I do and to make sure the things I am asking for and the things I am doing will glorify Him somehow or at least open up an opportunity for Him to be glorified. God sparing the life of that dog may seen frivolous to me, but it was an answered  request that has definitely brought glory to God. This boy has testified to his classmates of God's ability to answer prayer a few different times. Sparing that dog's life has helped this young man to experience God's graciousness in his life and he has shared a few times how he knows God has done this...this is why God answered his prayer, it wasn't just for his own selfish pleasure, but a chance to bring glory to God.
     This teen's testimony has really reinforced what God has been trying to teach me in James. Ask, the answer is definitely no if I don't. It's okay to ask for our desires even if, in the grand scheme of eternity, it makes no difference. If it truly is important to us, it is important to God and He can use those situations to bring glory to Himself...just ask my 15 year old student who is at home holding his dog tonight.