In her book The Alabaster Box[i], Ione Denton tells of looking out the front window of their home and seeing her five-year-old son Eric straddling his bicycle, his hands together in earnest prayer, head bowed. Then off he went.  And, plunk, to the ground he fell.

But he jumped up, resaid his prayers for help, and tried once more. Down he went again. Ione tells how she felt.

“My heart ached for him… But I continued to watch and breathed a prayer with him. Again he climbed astride the old bicycle…and off he went riding down the street as fast as his small legs could propel him.  He could ride the bike!”

“Oh God,” she prayed. “You have told us to ‘Knock…Seek…Ask…’. Help us to have the faith of a little child.”

Do some of us give up on prayer too soon? I think so. What we are asking for seems so difficult to us—even impossible, that we stop praying.

Jesus said, “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened (Luke 11:9-10). That’s pretty straightforward.

But do you remember the story Jesus told that precedes that promise? It’s about a man who went to his friend’s house in the middle of the night to borrow some bread because he had nothing to feed a traveling friend of his who had just arrived at his home. Jesus said it was because of the man’s persistence that his friend got out of bed and gave him the bread.

Persistent prayer! That’s the kind of prayer God rewards. Don’t give up!

[i] Ione Denton, The Alabaster Box (Self-published 2004), p. 25.