by Dennis and Barbara Rainey

Psalm 61:1,2
Hear my cry, O God; give heed to my prayer. From the end of the earth I call to Thee, when my heart is faint.

Discouragement. Who hasn't felt its chilling grip on the heart? Discouragement neutralizes optimism, assassinates hope and vaporizes courage. For many, a frequent source of discouragement is when it seems that God doesn't answer a crucial prayer.

Close friends of ours once went through the heart-ripping experience of a divorce. Their five-year-old, freckle-faced daughter was jerked north, then south as the marriage unraveled. For nearly three years Barbara and I had prayed. We counseled. We called. We wrote letters. We got them to attend two FamilyLife Marriage Conferences. We pleaded, reasoned and wept. We gave it our best shot. We kept praying.

The day the divorce was finalized, a piece of our heart was crushed as the judge's gavel came smashing down. We were bewildered. Confused. Didn't God say He hated divorce? We were left with a living mosaic of deceit, betrayal and broken promises. We were tempted to lose heart.

In the midst of such times I like to remember the British missionary Elizabeth Aleward. Miss Aleward had two great sorrows as a young girl: Her hair was black and straight (when all of the popular girls had a head full of golden curls), and while all her friends kept growing, she ended up short.

Years later, God called her to the mission field in China. As she stood looking at the people to whom God had called her to minister, she said two very apparent observations occurred to her. "First, each and every one of them had long, straight black hair. And, secondly, each and every one of them had stopped growing at exactly the same moment that I did. And I bowed my head and prayed, 'Jehovah God, You know what You are doing!'"

You and I will never lose heart as long as we know that God is in control. He knows what He's doing, even though we don't comprehend many times what His purposes are. He wants us to keep the faith, not lose it.

Prayer:

Thank God that He is in control and ask Him to help you when you go through periods of discouragement that rob you of your faith.

Discuss: Can you cite a heartfelt prayer of your own that apparently went unanswered? Have other events tempted you to lose heart?

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