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Your Answered Prayer Feels Different Than You Expected · Daily Devotions for Busy Lives

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  Track 1: Taylor Beebe was adopted from Thailand as a baby
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  and raised in the United States. For as long as she could
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  remember, she'd wondered about the woman who gave birth to her.
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  She'd built a picture of that reunion in her head and carried
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  it for years. In college, she started looking. A name written
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  on the back of an old photo led her to a Facebook page, and
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  Holtz Records confirmed it. This was her birth mother. After 20
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  years, she booked a flight to Thailand to finally meet her.
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  The truth Taylor had pictured this moment her whole life. What
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  she found in Thailand didn't match that picture. We'll come
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  back to what she found, but
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  welcome to Daily Devotions for Busy Lives. I'm Bart Léger.
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  When I first sensed God calling me to preach, I had a picture in
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  my head of what that would be. Mostly, it was from a pulpit, me
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  in front of people preaching eloquently and confidently. And
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  God gave me that. Well, not so sure about the eloquently. But
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  he also gave me the rest of it, which I hadn't pictured at all.
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  I spend much of my week at a desk trying to write a sermon
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  that won't always come together as quickly as I'd like. It's
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  phone calls to check on people who are sick and driving across
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  town to wait with the family sometimes. The call got answered.
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  It came with about 40 hours a week of things nobody pictures
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  when they picture preaching. And it took me a while to quit
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  treating those hours like the part that didn't count. Maybe
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  you prayed for something for years. The job, the restored
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  relationship, and then it came. You should be You are, in part,
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  but the answer didn't look like what you pictured. And there's
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  something else mixed in with the gratitude that you weren't
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  expecting to feel. You don't say anything because you don't want
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  to sound ungrateful, or worse, like you're criticizing what God
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  did. So you keep it to yourself. The psalmist had words for this
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  in Psalm 126, 1. When the Lord brought back His exiles to
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  Jerusalem, it was like a dream. Well, when we say, it was like a
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  dream, we sometimes use it differently than the psalm does.
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  We say, a dream come true, and we mean everything came to us
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  the way we hoped. The Hebrew here means, like dreamers. The
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  picture is of people who can't whether what's in front of them
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  is real or not. Now, put that next to what the return from
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  captivity was like in reality. A small group came back to a city
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  in ruins. The walls were down. The temple was gone. It was the
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  answer to 70 years of prayer, and it was not what anybody had
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  pictured while they were praying for it. There's a scene in Ezra
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  that I'm reminded of. When they laid the foundation of the
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  second temple, the older men who had seen the first one wept out
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  loud. Everybody else was shouting for joy. Ezra says the
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  two sounds mixed together so completely that you couldn't
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  tell them apart from a distance. Same day, same crowd. Some
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  people were celebrating what God had done, and some were grieving
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  what it wasn't. And the Holy Spirit saw fit to put both in
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  the record without correcting either one. Then look at what
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  Psalm 126 does with itself. Verses 2 and 3 are laughter and
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  singing with the line that the Lord has done amazing things for
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  us. The Psalm is glad, and it's good. then verse 4 turns right
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  around and prays, restore our fortunes, Lord. They're still
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  asking. The thing they prayed for came, and they're bringing
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  God the part that's still unfinished. Four lines later in
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  the same song. That's the whole permission you need. Scripture
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  doesn't make the people choose between the thanks and the ache.
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  It puts them side by side in one Psalm and never suggests. One
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  cancels out the other. So do both this week. Thank God for
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  the exact thing He gave you. Say what it was, the job you have,
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  or the person who's talking to you again. Then tell Him about
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  the picture you're still holding. Then tell Him, you're letting it
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  go. That picture was real to you. You built it over the years of
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  asking, and losing it is a loss, even though the thing you got is
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  good. When Taylor stood in front of her birth mother in Krabi for
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  the first time, it felt like a dream. And then the dream got
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  complicated. She was physically at home in Thailand, in the
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  country she came from, and emotionally she felt like a
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  stranger to all of it.
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  It brought, in her words, joy, grief, hope, sorrow, and love
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  all at once. The reunion she'd prayed for came. It just came
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  with more than she'd packed for. She got her mother back and
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  grieved 20 years. She could never get back, both in the same
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  breath. And she had to learn that both could be true at the
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  same time. Both could be true. That's the lesson the people of
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  the Temple Foundation were learning. And it's the one Psalm
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  126 was written by somebody who'd already learned. Here's
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  today's challenge. Write down the thing you prayed for and got.
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  Then write two sentences under it. One starts with, thank you,
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  for, and the other one starts with, what I pictured was. And
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  then pray both of them this evening. Don't clean up the
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  second one before you bring it to God. He already knows what
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  you'd been picturing because He listened to you describe it for
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  years. And give yourself some time. An answer you waited 20
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  years for takes longer than a week to get used to. Father, You
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  brought Your people home, and they said it was like a dream.
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  And the men who remembered the old temple wept while everybody
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  else shouted for joy. Thank you that you wrote both of those
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  down. For everybody listening who got what they asked for and
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  can't say what else came with it, give them the room to tell you.
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  Let them thank you for the answer and grieve the picture in
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  the same breath. In Jesus' name, amen. If this episode encouraged
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  you today, would you share it with someone who might need to
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  hear it? Just go to dailydevotionsforbusylives.com
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  slash 351 and copy the link. It only takes a second, and it
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  might make a difference in someone's day. Thanks for
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  joining me on Daily Devotions for Busy Lives. Remember, the
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  weeping and the shouting were in the same crowd on the same day,
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  and God wrote them both down. Bring in both. Come back next
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  time for more encouragement to help you live grounded in God's
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  truth. Until then, God bless, and have a great day.