We ask for stuff/bread/water and He gives Himself.
We ask for healing.
We ask for guidance.
We want to distinguish good from evil.
I find in my prayers lately that God is frequently responding to my petitions with a big grin and an enthusiastic "I'm Here!"
And I look in Scriptures and I find the same thing.
He says to pray for daily bread, but then he says "I am the Bread of life." He provides water, manna, and quail in the desert, but really wants to be at the center of the camp and be the central focus of our lives. To focus on the quail and the bread and the water is our mistake. He says "You need sustenance? Yes, I'm here!"
He celebrates our faith when we ask for healing, but in giving healing he gives himself. It's by his stripes that we are healed, which means that the healing isn't something that he is dispensing like tennis balls shooting from a machine, but that the healing we receive is through him. It's not hard to imagine that he heals by coming upon us, enfolding us, and taking our infirmities away with him as he absorbs them from us. We don't get healing From him as much as we get healing through him.
The conversations about "focus on the Giver rather than the gift" are less relevant when we stop looking at blessings as gifts that exist apart from his presence, when we stop differentiating the gift and the giver as if they exist apart from each other. To get a gift of money is a familiar paradigm for us, but it's somehow less "true" than the idea of Jehovah Jireh settling himself down in and among us, becoming our provision rather than being the Giver of a gift that exists apart from himself.
We want his guidance. We pray for it as if he's going to issue us a map or set of directions, so we can leave his presence and go find the way that he's chosen for us to go. And I know this is going to sound unsafe, but I think lots of people take the Scriptures and hang onto them as if they are given so we can trust in them if God leaves us. But he didn't come to give us "the way," right? He claimed to BE the Way. He didn't come to give us "the Logos," right? He came to BE the Logos. I don't think he's interested in giving us a map--he wants to be our map.
Like Pilate, people today ask "what is truth?" If they are believers, they're asking God to show them, reveal to them, what the truth is for them. Truth is a person. He says "I am here!" You don't get to have a truth that is amputated from him so that you can have it to carry around.
He's the Vine, and we stay plugged into him. He didn't give us lithium battery packs and command us to stay close to the Charging Station, to come back for refills of him as needed. We actually live and move IN him, and we're empowered by him only when we're fully plugged into him (though an argument could be made for a solar power metaphor here).
We read in Genesis that our original parents knew right from wrong because they walked in the Garden and could ask at any time. The temptation for them was to know *independently* if something was good or evil, to eat from a tree that would give them that knowledge. God's design was for us to look to him, like a child glances to its mother, to know if a new thing is okay to touch, good or bad.
