It’s easy to forget that God can hear the subtext of our prayers. We can pray “not my will but Yours be done” until we are blue in the face, but if we really mean “God, I think this would be great so please give it to me”, He hears that part too. So, it does us no good to say the “right prayers” that we don’t really mean (I wouldn’t suggest praying “God, I don’t care what You want, I know what’s best for my life” to the all-knowing, all-powerful creator of all things either).

Every hour of every day is a constant choice to choose our path or God’s path. Both will involve heartache, disappointment and struggles. But God’s path uses those struggles to grow us closer to Him, and our path uses them to compound our problems and distance ourselves from His love.

But when we ask for His will and mean it, our anxiety fades into peace, because we know His ways are better than ours anyway. We don’t even have to worry about what that means. We can just live in gratitude for what He’s given us, and is giving us, even when we don’t yet know what that is.