So I became dreadfully afraid, and said to the king, “May the king live forever! Why should my face not be sad, when the city, the place of my fathers’ tombs, lies waste, and its gates are burned with fire?”
Then the king said to me, “What do you request?”
So I prayed to the God of heaven. And I said to the king, “If it pleases the king, and if your servant has found favor in your sight, I ask that you send me to Judah, to the city of my fathers’ tombs, that I may rebuild it.” Nehemiah 2:2-5
So I prayed to the God of heaven. This wasn’t a long, drawn-out prayer. There wasn’t time for that. This was an arrow prayer, so to speak. Straight and swift to God. Yet this wasn’t an off-the-cuff prayer. Nehemiah had been praying for days about this. Fasting even. What a lesson for us.
