Undeserved Answers to Prayer

Last week I mentioned that I was grateful for our new car, and promised the story, well here it is.

As most of you will know, petrol prices are absolutely sky-rocketing at the minute, and the last car my husband and I owned was a bit of a gas guzzler. Ok, it was more like a gas drainer.

Seriously, I didn't realise that a car could go through so much fuel so quickly!

We decided that it was an unnecessary expense, and really was draining our resources, so we decided to sell it and buy a more economical car.

We spent days traipsing round various car places, looking at adverts on the internet and didn't find anything suitable within our budget that we were happy with. All the cars had high mileage or questionable service history or both.

In desperation, we decided to try the auctions.

We found a car on the internet that we would be interested in, and went down to look at them. It had a really low mileage and looked in good condition, but had nothing else. No tax, MOT or service history. At the auction we were at, we couldn't even get into the car before bidding.

We took a chance, bid on the car and won it. Now, I had prayed about the car before hand, but if I'm honest, it was rather a half hearted prayer, and I didn't really expect God to answer it. I hadn't been reading my Bible for a few days, and felt really far from God.

Once we won the car, we had the problem of how to get it to a garage to MOT it, because you can't drive a car on the roads without tax and MOT, and you can't get tax without an MOT.

We were beginning to think that this had maybe not been such a bargain after all, despite its really low mileage.

However, when we paid for the car and got the keys, we found that in actual fact, it did have a current MOT that was valid for almost a year, and it had full service history. It had even had a very expensive part replaced just 2 months earlier that we had been expecting to replace.

Wow! I was in shock. Even though I felt so unworthy, God had really come through for us. My husband knew that had other bidders known about the cars MOT and history, it would have sold at a price way out of our league.

Now I know that God doesn't always work like that, and really that we can never deserve anything from Him, but sometimes it can be tempting to think that when we feel we are walking well with Him, that in some way He owes us one, when actually He owes us nothing at all.

Conversely, we can feel like I did that when we aren't walking with Him, that we don't deserve to ask for anything, so when He does give us good gifts, we are almost shell shocked like I was.

What I guess I'm trying to say is that God is our Father. He loves to give us gifts, even though we don't ever and can never deserve them. The greatest undeserved gift He ever gave was His Son.

He gives us life everyday, breath in our lungs and all the wonderful things around us. I find it easy to be grateful for the big things in life, like our new car, and its right to be grateful for those, but what about all the little things that we so often take for granted. So this week I'm trying to be grateful for the things I so often take for granted as well as the big things:

- Food on the table
- Clothes to wear
- Breath in my lungs
- Clean air to breathe
- Family and friends
- A house to live in
- A healthy body

What "everyday" things are you grateful for today?