We often joke about the notion of praying to God for certain things because we believe those prayers to be dangerous. We believe that praying for patience or peace is particularly bad. We don’t want to have God subject us to a series of events which would then challenge our patience or peace. So, we tells ourselves to never pray for that.

There are two concepts at work in this thought. First, is the idea that God is somehow out to get us. It’s as if we ask for something, he will delight in cruelly leading us to that which we asked for. The second is that we understand that peace and patience are not simply imparted, but that it is a discipline learned only through exposure to that which is chaotic and stressful. We get that God isn’t going to just download these things into us. We are going to have to learn them and grown in them if we wan ...