It really hadn’t occurred to me up until now, but where in the Bible does God do something totally predictable? Where do we find the people of God saying, ‘Yes, God has acted exactly as we expected.’ Of course, there are some things that are predictable: we know that God will always be true to himself; we know that at his very heart God is Love, and that his love will be the hallmark of all his involvement with us. What is unpredictable is what God will do, how he will do it and when. And let’s face it, as he look back over the great godly events in history, we wouldn’t have believed them had he had foreknowledge of them, and afterwards we are left amazed and in awe. Bearing all this in mind, how do we go about praying? 

Prayer is a personal engagement between ourselves and God, and like in any good conversation we would do well to pause at the beginning and just remember with whom we are conversing. It is so easy, when meeting someone, to just launch in and offload our own agenda. We sometimes inadvertently use the other person as a receptacle into which we throw our words. A better conversation is one where there is true engagement with each other – speaking, listening, and then more speaking followed by more listening – and in the listening we can show genuine interest in the other person. Sometimes we might find that at the end of a conversation we haven’t said what we had originally intended to mention…but it doesn’t matter. Prayer is an enriching engagement with God who is profoundly, interested, interesting, and full of surprises.