LIFE CHANGING PRAYER compiled by Debra Maffett

Tears glistened in her eyes as she said, “I’m going to break the
engagement. If God wants me to marry Jeb, he will see that things
change—about the drinking and all.” Right then, simply and
poignantly, she told God of her decision. She was putting her broken
dreams and her future into God’s hands.
Jeb’s ideas and ideals didn’t change, so Sara did not marry him. But a
year later she wrote me an ecstatic letter. “It nearly killed me to give up
Jeb. Yet God knew that he wasn’t the one for me. Now I’ve met The Man
and we’re to be married. Now I really have something to say about
trusting God!”
It’s good to remember that not even the Master Shepherd can lead if the
sheep have not this trust in him. That’s the why of Christ’s insistence on
practical obedience: “And why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not the
things which I say?” (Luke 6:46). Our pliability must be complete, from
our wills right on through to our actions.
When we come right down to it, how can we make obedience real,
except as we give over our self-will in reference to each of life’s episodes
as it unfolds? That’s why it shouldn’t surprise us that at the heart of the
secret of answered prayer lies the Law of Relinquishment.
So Mrs. Nathaniel Hawthorne, wife of the famous American author,
found as she wrestled in prayer in the city of Rome one day in 1860.
Una, the Hawthornes’ eldest daughter, had a virulent form of malaria.
The attending physician had that afternoon warned that unless the
young girl’s fever abated before morning, she would die.
As Mrs. Hawthorne sat by Una’s bed, her thoughts went to what her
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