I felt the doubts and angst creeping in from months away. A shadow hanging over September. What should have been an exciting time, our first year of having children in school full time, felt heavy. Our decision to educate them mostly at home left me exhausted in my thoughts. How would I ever carve out a hefty chunk of our day to teach them? Plans have a way of sprouting doubts as their day approaches.

Maybe this wasn’t for us, after all. Yet one evening, sitting out in the yard after the kids went to bed, watching the sunset, I replayed our reasons in my mind, and they were sound.

One big question sat soaking in a puddle of guilt deep within me. What if I don’t want to do this?

And so I prayed. God, give me the desire to do this.

It felt risky at first, like an unstable prayer. Shouldn’t I be praying for energy, consistency, strategy, or wisdom? And of course I was. But first and foremost, I needed the want to do it. Sometimes in order to face our biggest insecurities or vulnerable places, we must bring our prayer unadorned, not dressing it up in eloquent words, or side-stepping our real longing. God wants us as we are. He knows we are messy, and so He wants us messy. He knows we are incomplete, so He wants us incomplete. We don’t have time to straighten ourselves out first.

In his book A Praying Life, author Paul E. Miller writes, “When we stop being ourselves with God, we are no longer in real conversation with God.”

God knows when I’m not enjoying my children.

He sees the tension when my three-year-old asks me to play on the floor with him, and I would rather not.

My insecurities about homeschooling are not hidden from him.

He feels me bristling when my child wraps his arms around me, and tired and weary from the day, I just don’t want to be touched.

I was recently sitting in a room full of young moms, hearing from a panel of older moms who have gone before us, when one mentor mama challenged us with this: “If you’re tired and don’t want to make love to your husband, pray for the desire,” and then she added with a smile, “just don’t tell your husband that you’re praying for that.”

God sees me in my selfish places. He knows that our hearts lament along with the apostle Paul in Romans: “For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.  For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.” Romans 7:18-19

God sees us as we are, and He’s not deterred. He doesn’t grimace. He doesn’t even bat an eye.

He wants us as we are: needy. We can approach the throne of grace with our real, raw prayers.

Lord, help me to enjoy playing with my children.

Lord, give me the desire to read with them.

God, give me the desire to be intimate with my husband when I would rather sleep.

God, help me to be faithful in this ministry I would rather walk away from.

God, stir my affections toward the little ones you have given me. Take away guilt, melt away my selfishness, help me to see the unique, beautiful qualities you have sown into them, and help me to laugh at their jokes.

Something stunning happened after I laid my request, real and raw, at the feet of Jesus. I didn’t wake up the next morning with an overwhelming desire to teach multiplication tables or the meaning of a homonym. Instead, God threw fuel on the fire in my heart to disciple my children. As they struggled to pay attention to lessons, or broke into a feud over a spelling game, my mind went immediately to the most important education I could give them, in how to be like Jesus in that moment. He drew a line in my heart from the practical, every-day lesson teaching to the spiritual, eternal opportunities.

Jesus didn’t mask His own prayer on the eve of His death. Kneeling in Gethsemane He prayed His heart’s desire. “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me.” We can pray boldly, too. But we must also be willing to speak the rest of that prayer, “Yet not as I will, but as you will.”

When we come as we are and lay our messy prayers at the feet of Jesus, the most beautiful thing He can do is show us His own heart. And that becomes the answer to our prayers.

Grant us the desires of our hearts, oh God. But first, bring those desires in alignment with Your own heart. Your will be done.