{"id":261,"date":"2006-10-13T15:20:35","date_gmt":"2006-10-13T20:20:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/2006\/what-we-want\/"},"modified":"2006-10-13T20:18:15","modified_gmt":"2006-10-14T01:18:15","slug":"what-we-want","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/2006\/what-we-want\/","title":{"rendered":"What we want"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s not always easy to know how to pray for a baby. (Other than, “O God, please let her fall asleep now.”) But it occurs to me that there’s a ready-made list that pretty much sums it all up for me. <\/p>\n

\"What<\/p>\n

I had a professor at the University of Michigan who wisely pointed out one day in class as we were discussing early American history, “There are two kinds of people in the world: those who believe God answers prayer, and those who don’t.” I’m one of the former. But it’s dangerous to assume that the pray-ers think the world is any simpler than the non-pray-ers do. (Perhaps quite the contrary, actually.)<\/p>\n

Just for starters, it’s often hard to know what to pray for. This is partly because prayer shouldn’t always be about praying _for_ something. But on top of that, knowing what I really want is usually harder than advertised — let alone what God might want.<\/p>\n

But a while back, I was watching Lucy and mulling over my hopes for her to grow as a loving and joyful and peaceful person, and all of a sudden it was obvious: “love, joy, peace….” This list was ringing a bell:<\/p>\n

bq. [T]the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control (“Gal. 5:22-23”:http:\/\/www.biblegateway.com\/passage\/?search=Galatians5&version=72).<\/p>\n

These “fruits of the Spirit” really sum up what we long for (and long to contribute to) in Lucy. What a rich vision! Who wouldn’t want to know and be known by a loving Lucy — a joyful Lucy — a peaceful, peace-loving, and peace-making Lucy — a patient Lucy — a kind Lucy — a good Lucy — a faithful Lucy — a gentle Lucy — a Lucy in full command of herself. What a Lucy that would be!<\/p>\n

So that’s what we want.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s not always easy to know how to pray for a baby. (Other than, “O God, please let her fall asleep now.”) But it occurs to me that there’s a ready-made list that pretty much sums it all up for me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kids"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=261"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}