My friend, healing pastor Nigel Mumford, said to me not long ago, “So often in our prayers we don’t think big enough, dream big enough or ask big enough. God wants more for us than we often imagine.”
I was pondering his words recently on a sweltering summer day. The heat was stifling and the humidity even more intense. I’d gone outside for lunch in the middle of the day and wondered if you could bake an egg on the sidewalk. It was that warm.
Read More: Mornings with Jesus Devotional
How glad I was to retreat back to my air-conditioned office. I continued working all afternoon and headed home after six. The sky seemed to be brewing something, clouds masking the sun, a breeze picking up some scattered bits of paper on the street.
But it was still hot.
I took the subway home, a 35-minute ride underground from one end of Manhattan to the other. I got out in our leafier neighborhood, took the elevator up to the street and stepped into what seemed a completely new weather system.
It had rained apparently, the sidewalk was still damp and the leaves on the upper branches of the trees shimmered in the last of the sunlight. The air was fresh, clean, clear. And the temperature must have dropped 10 degrees.
It was a lovely summer evening, something to be savored, a moment to open a window and feel the cooling breeze. A seasonable reason to rejoice.
But as I walked from the subway to home the biggest sound I could hear was the rumble of everyone’s air-conditioners, working their hardest, keeping everyone’s home cool. Even our window unit was on full-blast.
God’s gift of a beautiful evening was something that none of us could quite take in. We were still focusing on that other gift of summer: air-cooled temps.
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Like I say, I’m as grateful as the next guy for the wonders of air-conditioning–I don’t mean this story to denigrate that. But what the scene made me think of was all those time God might have been yearning to give me something greater, better for me, more suited to the day, than I had ever dared ask for.
Maybe God was urging me to take in something marvelous he had to offer. All I had to turn off what I thought was the means to comfort and happiness and look out and look up.
All I had to do was open a window to take in something glorious already here.
