Where's The Umbrella?

One of my mentors used to say if you are praying for rain but haven’t purchased an umbrella, then you really have not prayed. This observation is one of those observations that didn’t mean a whole lot to me when I first heard it. Back then, it was just a delicious utterance that tickled my ears.  Its’ truth had not yet penetrated into the marrow of my soul. But these days, there is rarely a day that it isn’t on my mind. It is easy to pray. But it isn’t so easy to arrange or rearrange your life as if your prayers will be answered. Let’s call this idea the “umbrella apothegm.”

Unfortunately, far too many of our prayers are uttered in desperation, not anticipation.  They are offered as an emergency and not with excitement.  And they emerge from  fear, not faith. We are guilty of what the Puritan theologian Stephen Charnock called “practical atheism.” A practical atheist is not someone who denies that God exists. A practical atheist is someone who behaves as if God does not exist. As Charnock so eloquently put it, “men’s practices are the best indexes of their principles: the current of a man’s life is the counterpart of the frame of his heart…Who can deny an atheism in the heart, when so much is visible in the life?”

To pray and not behave as if God can or will answer your prayer is an insult to the God that you are praying to. In Mark 11:24, Jesus said “For this reason I am telling you, whatever things you ask for in prayer [in accordance with God’s will], believe [with confident trust] that you have received them, and they will be given to you. To believe that you have received what you have prayed for will impact your behavior. Instead of complaining, you will be confident. Instead of surrendering, you will strategize. And instead of pouting, you will plan.

This is what I heard a preacher did in Texas. He had recently moved his ministry to Dallas and was trying to rally support from his parishioners to construct a new building. After checking and rechecking, and securing confirmation that God had instructed him to build, he started making moves. He had zero money for a building. So what did he do? He hired one company to conduct a soil analysis, and then hired another to dig a hole in the ground. He said that although he did not have the money to build, he would start acting as if he did. He later testified that when people “saw the hole” in the ground, they started supporting the project.  5 years later, the building was erected, debt free.  

You may not be a preacher, live in Dallas, or be trying to build a church. But whatever you do, and wherever you live and whatever you’re trying to build, embrace the ‘“umbrella apothegm.” If you are praying for rain, buy an umbrella.

Have you considered that perhaps God has not sent the rain precisely because you don’t have an umbrella?