Praying in FaithExemplo

Praying the Heart’s Desires

“It is a safe thing to trust him to fulfill the desire that he creates,” Amy Carmichael once said of God’s willingness to respond to human longings. And because he stirred compassion in her heart, she spent 55 years of her life in India, most of those years rescuing children from temple prostitution and slavery. Her work infuriated temple authorities. She endured accusations and legal prosecution, and she had to overcome the resistance of other missionaries who thought she was wasting her time or becoming too focused on what they saw as a relatively minor issue. But Carmichael knew what happened behind temple doors—she had stained her skin with teabags, covered herself in a sari, and entered in at times. Amy had a passion for the children who had been dedicated to temple priests by their parents or had otherwise been drawn into captivity. By faith, she simply went where she was led, ministered where her heart was drawn, and fulfilled the vision and desires God had given her. The ministry she began in the early 1900s continues today.

Carmichael wasn’t driven by an overarching vision—at least not at first. She had sensed a call to missions in general and worked in several ministry fields, but she followed God’s leading step-by-step into the type of ministry for which she eventually became known. She responded to needs, and those responses built certain interests and desires in her heart. She pursued the passions she had been given by faith in order to help a segment of the population that had few, if any, advocates. Amy understood the workings of God in her heart and wrote about them prolifically. She dedicated her life to the moment-by-moment calling God had given her.

Sometimes God fills our hearts with faith for a big vision or a specific calling, and sometimes he unfolds the vision only a day or a season at a time. He knows when we need the whole blueprint and when it’s better to have it in stages; usually our faith involves elements of both.

No matter how big and coherent your vision seems, the response of faith is always for today. Faith embraces God-given desires and takes the next step toward them.