Sovereignty of God in a Sunday Morning Prayer

Our kids will tend to utilize run-on sentences at times.
This is especially true with Ab at bed time. After teeth are brushed and other duties are deftly put to rest, it is time for prayer and then a goodnight kiss. It is at that point- following our prayer - that she seems to want to cram as much conversation as possible into the time that elapses while I travel from her bedside to the bedroom door. In machine-gun style, she hammers away as if she is in a competition that she will lose if I manage to get a word in edge-wise.

On many nights, the only way to signal an end is for me (or Mom depending on whose turn it is), to slowly pull the door closed. This allows her to edit her remarks in order for her to close with a "G'night Dad, I love you!" before the door is completely shut.

I love my little girl.

AA is more like me and tends to be halting in his speech patterns and -as fits our southern culture - slow. But nonetheless, he too can run-on with the best of them.

This morning as we drove to church, AA volunteered to lead us in prayer. He went through what has become both his and Ab's standard lines... "We thank You for this day" ... "we pray that no one will get hurt..." etc.

But then he decided to veer from the mundane and spend some time on his teacher at school. She is very ill and we, as a family have been praying for her. I think that once he got into this new territory of spontaneity in his praying, he may have been worried that someone would stop him before he completed it. The prayer went something like this:

...God bless my teacher 'cause she is really, really sick ...
... and I know You know that...
'cause you know the thoughts ...and , um....
-well, I don't really remember that verse,
-but I know you know that too! ...

That is a six-year-old understanding of the sovereignty of God.

We know He cares; we know He can do what He said He would do; and we know He knows what He promised He would do... even when we can't quite remember it.

I heard a sermon today from a series on the attributes of God, it focused on the fact that God is good. We can depend on Him to do what is best (though that may not always be what we like).

His goodness is not based on whether or not I deserve it (because I never would), but rather it is based on His nature.

That sermon was a good follow-up to the sermon I had already heard coming from my backseat.