Come And Magnify The Lord With Me

We found her prayer book. These were the prayers she had written twenty one years ago when she first began to loose her vision and recognized that she was beginning to have trouble with her memory. Ma Belle had come from a long line of “worriers.” Being anxious about the people she loved often plagued her. Opening the pages of her prayer book was like stepping into a conversation she was having with her Heavenly Father.

“Do not be anxious about anything , but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made to God” (Philippians 4:6). The pages began with her neat and concise handwriting. Her words exposed the fullness of her heart but the focus of her prayers was not the problem that was facing her or her family the focus of her prayer was the God to whom she brought her petition.

“I will praise the name of God with a song. I will magnify him with thanksgiving” (Psalm 69:30). Ma Belles prayers were like a telescope that searched the Heavens and found the throne of God. As she filled page after page with her prayers based on who He is and not on what she was experiencing at the moment I saw God magnified. Though she was bound by time she prayed to a God who was not hemmed in by time. Her earthly vision was fading but her prayers so full of praise and thanksgiving showed someone who had keen spiritual insight.

By the end of the prayer book the words were no longer touching the lines because she could no longer see them. She had filled the book with prayers for herself and those she loved. She had come before and an all-sufficient God and had humbled herself before him not with arrogance but with the heart of a child. She brought Him the only thing she had to give, her brokenness her worries and concerns for those she loved “The sacrifices acceptable to God is a broken spirit. A broken and a contrite heart, O God thou wilt not despise” (Psalm 51). Yes, she brought her brokenness before Him but she magnified Him with her praise and thanksgiving.

O Heavenly Father, thank you for helping me see you more clearly through the praise and thanksgiving I find in this prayerbook. Please let the legacy I leave to those I love be like the legacy Ma Belle left us. May I too live my life in humble dependance on an all-sufficient God. As I humbling come before you in my brokenness and dependance on your love and mercy may my prayers magnify you and not my anxieties.