This is a guest post from Peri Koussa - a fourth year PharmD student at MCPHS University in Boston.  Aside from being a future health care professional, Peri is also - in her own words - "a closet poet and strong believer in the power of words."  You can see more of Peri's work by checking her out on SoundCloud.  And if you too are interested in guest posting on my blog, please visit my Guest Post guidelines for more info.

Sometimes I wish prayer was as easy as using an app. I would ask to get to my next life destination and God would Uber me from point A to point B.  I would ask for direction and He'd lead me to google maps. I would ask for creative inspiration and I'd get a Pinterest thread in my thoughts.

I wish I’d get a notification every time God was online, so I could message to bug Him about that job I'm trying to find or that friend I'm trying to help or that feeling that I need Him to rid me of.  I wish God would use the weather app to show me if today was going to be a sunny day or a rainy one. I'd dress accordingly.

The millennial in me wants God, who is timeless, to submit to my cyber world. I want Him to come to me in a form that I could understand and be able to communicate with.  I guess the millennial in me forgets that God lives inside me and doesn't need to be made into a form that I can understand and be able to communicate with in order to be real. The millennial in me forgets that prayer isn't meant to be a request that I type in as I await an APPlicable response (pun intended). 

The millennial in me has gotten so used to things being made easy that I expected prayer to be easy, too. And after realizing that prayer is not that simple, I lost faith in it altogether until I re-stumbled upon this verse:

“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened” (Matthew 7: 7-8).

That verse validated that God does respond, I was just ignoring Him – all thanks to my cyber world. 

This world taught me to expect to receive what I ask for. I mean, when I use Uber, I expect to find a ride. When I use google maps, I expect to find a destination. When I use Pinterest, I expect to be inspired. So when I pray, it was natural of me to expect a reply. And God says that He will reply. So where was the disconnect? 

Then I realized that I was expecting God to reply to me the way I wanted Him to. I turned prayer into a request and receive without realizing it, I turned prayer into an app. It was only then that I realized why I hadn’t been hearing Him.

I was waiting for God to transport, direct and inspire me. I didn’t notice that to transport me, God was teaching me how to drive. To direct me, He was rerouting my path. And to inspire me, He helped me believe in myself.

I was waiting for God to fulfill my prayer request without realizing that He was working on me so I would be able to fulfill it.