God answers my prayers.

I mean it. Everything I have committed to the Lord, He has done for me.

Not always in the timing I asked, or the way I expected it, but He has answered!

Little story.

A year ago, I began to pray for the future freshmen of NAU InterVarsity. I knew that August 2014 would arrive, my second year as a staff for IV at NAU, and I would want a great and wonderful freshman class. So I prayed for them.

Dear God, bring me 25 crazy awesome freshmen in love with you and ready to bring your Kingdom near to this campus.

Dear God, those freshmen are seniors. Bless their final semesters in high school. Draw them closer to you. Bless their senior proms. Give them summers that they fall in love with you and summers they never forget. Inspire them to be world changers.

So then I met a bunch of them at Freshmen Orientation. We had a table out on the lawn on a quad in between a few major freshmen dorms, right beside a volleyball court. We asked them, “How do you want to change the world?” And the ones who answered something having to do with Jesus, I told them that they were who I had been looking for all along! Little did I know that my silly idea to have a water fight two days before school began would turn into the place where I met a lot of those amazing freshmen I had been praying for. We ended up playing in that muddy volleyball court right next to where I had met some of them.

Fast forward a year after I started to pray: several of those freshmen are amazing, inspiring leaders in our community. They say yes over and over. They teach ME grace, optimism, and patience. Some of them dream even more wildly than I do!

Did I not tell you that God answers my prayers? He just answers them HIS way! And it’s always better than my prayers!

Something I’ve learned about God in my time of ministry is that He is the God who goes before us. He says this a lot in the Bible, too, so I shouldn’t be surprised. In fact, how He says He’ll go before us is WILD in the Bible:

I will go before you
    and will level the mountains;
I will break down gates of bronze
    and cut through bars of iron.
³ I will give you hidden treasures,
    riches stored in secret places,
so that you may know that I am the Lord,
    the God of Israel, who summons you by name.

-Isaiah 45

Not only will God bring people into community for me, but He has gone ahead of Kings of this earth, leveled mountains, brought down nations who were against Him, to make Himself known and bless His people.

My God is a mighty God.

He went before me to Tucson and prepared a community for me to enter as a freshmen that would change my life forever. He went before me to England and prepared experiences and relationships that would shape who I am today. He went before me into the dorms my senior year, to bring multiple freshmen into relationship with me so that we could learn and love together. He went before me to Boulder, brought me a team that I vow to see every first weekend in March because they are my family, a family who I love so deeply. He came to Flagstaff before me, brought my brother and sister in law and niece into this world so that I would have family here too. He has always made a way for me to know that He is LORD and he has summoned me by name every where I go.

This is why I pray WAY ahead of time. I expect that God will summon me into new and unreached places, to make it known that He alone is Lord of all creation, a MIGHTY God who saves and saves and saves.

Just to throw it back a little more, I want to say that God even went before my unsaved parents to Phoenix, AZ in the early 80s. He whispered into the ears of his followers here. He had my family members praying for my parents. He had my grandmother hold me in her arms and dedicate me to the Lord before my father dedicated his own life to Jesus. God came before us so that we wouldn’t have to be without him.

Jesus came before me. And he knew it was for me. And my mom and dad and those freshmen and these college students all over Arizona and the nation and the world.

Because Jesus came, we must pray and trust that because He lives, he will still go before us into all the hard and scary places being the Mighty God He is, just so we know that He is Lord, so we don’t miss out.

And I wouldn’t miss it for the world!