Expect the Unexpected

Hi, I’m Tami, and this is a Moment for Mom

I recently had a chance to meet Bob Berklow, the head chaplain for Alpha Acres, a drug and alcohol recovery program for men. The men in the program spend a year living at Alpha Acres which is situated on over 100 acres in Yadkinville. For the past two years, Alpha Acres has taken advantage of their sprawling property and hosted a giant corn maze as an outreach to the community and a fundraiser for the program. It’s been a huge success, with hundreds of people coming each year to enjoy a day of old-fashioned family fun.

This year, Bob says he wasn’t sure if the corn maze would happen. You see, one requirement for a corn maize is very tall corn. After all, finding your way through a corn maze when you can see over the stalks is not much of a challenge. Growing tall corn requires a fair amount of rain during the growing season. And, this past summer, Bob says they hardly got any rain at all. So, he did what a good chaplain should do, he prayed for rain. And he prayed, and prayed and then prayed some more. But, the rain never fell. Bob started to worry. Why wasn’t God answering his pleas for precipitation?

Bob says that what he saw was that, despite his prayers, no rain was falling. But what he didn’t see was that, despite the lack of rain, his corn was growing, and growing well. In fact by the end of the season, Alpha Acres corn grew over 9’ tall, while a neighboring farmer’s corn grew only about half that tall. Bob now laughs at his poor observational skills. He realizes that God WAS hearing and answering his prayers. Just not in the way he’d expected.

In fact, God often doesn’t answer our prayers the way we expect, does He? In Isaiah 55:8 God tells us that he doesn’t do things the way we do them and he doesn’t think the way we think. And, in Proverbs 3:5, we’re reminded to “Trust in the Lord with all our Hearts and lean not on our own understanding”.

So, the next time you feel like your prayers aren’t being heard, look around. God may be working, just not the in the way you expected.