An Answered Prayer, Ten Years in the Making
I never really thought I had much of a faith story to share; there was never any dramatic conversion, the skies didn’t open, no voices spoke to me, and I wasn’t prophesied to or cured of terminal diseases. My earliest experiences of divine intervention consisted mainly of mom praying for parking spots and me sobbing to the heavens that my lost necklace or misplaced sunglasses would rematerialize— oh pretty please, Amen!
I will have you know that these prayers were often answered, though they hardly seemed like worthy testimonies because who’s to say we didn’t just get lucky, or that I’ve at last outgrown my absent-mindedness? And it seemed ridiculous to claim that an almighty Creator would possibly consider sparing His time and grace over such trivial things.
When I received my first job offer, the jury is still out on whether I fully comprehended what was happening. Within seconds, I decided to uproot my life and move to a city I had never heard of before. Not having a clue where exactly this city was or how to pronounce its name correctly or even the fact that there was still a chance of heavy snow in April didn’t faze me. Maybe it was because my mom was equally nonchalant about me moving halfway across the world to what we would later come to know as the closest thing to a polar vortex without actually being in the Arctic.
I suppose my mom’s composure wasn’t entirely without basis though; she had suddenly recalled that one of her closest childhood friends from church had lived in this city for decades. In the most unlikely of places and in perhaps my greatest hour (or rather, months, which then turned into years) of need, I was taken in by a God-loving surrogate family that saw me through my most formative years in adulthood. Call it luck or another happy coincidence, but the way that the stars seemed to align was uncanny to say the least.
As much as I wanted to build my career and knew that my best shot was in the States, deep down, there had always been a gnawing longing to return home and be with my family. And so I kept this in my prayers. While the intensity and frequency may have varied over the years, this was perhaps my single most consistent prayer request. For the longest time, I was convinced that He had already answered me in His silence and in the many rejections I received in my every attempt to move back to Asia.
But then out of the blue, an opportunity too good to refuse, too tailored to be claimed by anyone else but me, materialized out of thin air. This opportunity wouldn’t take me directly home, but certainly close enough and on terms much better than I could’ve ever planned for or imagined.
Shortly before my homecoming to the continent I had bid farewell to nearly a decade ago, I came across Isaiah 43:16-19: “… He who made a way through the sea, a path through the mighty waters… I am making a way in the wilderness, streams in the wasteland.” As I read these words, I realized this was exactly what God had done for me; it might have taken nearly ten years and it might not have been exactly how I had pictured it, but He most certainly made a way for me through the mighty waters and returned me home.
Some might be discouraged by the fact that my single most consistent prayer request took nearly a decade to be answered, but I’ve learned that what makes something miraculous isn’t so much the length of time it takes to transpire, but the string of moments leading up to it. Each and every moment was meaningful, carefully and purposefully designed and curated by God, building up to something so much more than the sum of its parts, none of which could simply be explained away by mere luck or coincidence.
I still don’t hear booming voices or see visions of the skies opening. My life, much like my faith story, remains as ordinary as can be. And yet, even in the most mundane of moments, I have a renewed conviction that my God will go to unfathomable lengths for even my most trivial needs precisely because He is my Creator. Apart from Him, I have no good thing and I don’t need to survive a car crash or lightning strike to experience divine intervention because there was never a moment throughout my entire life where He was not at the helm.
Angela Ma
Podcaster - Radio Taiwan Taipei Family 97.7
Singapore