Finding Faith ... in prayer, even if it seems selfish

Is a prayer to God ever too selfish?

I asked myself this question during a challenging time yesterday, and frankly I don't have an answer.

There are certainly a myriad of scriptures that deal with the question of prayer. Google it, and you'll find almost an infinite list of them. ... Like 1 John 5:14-15: "14 And this is the boldness we have in him, that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. 15 And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have obtained the requests made of him."

Taken literally, it would seem according to that text, there is no prayer that is too selfish. But, an incident that happened yesterday still has be unconvinced.

Let me set the scene for you:

In my "day job," I run a small, start-up media technology company called Modulist which I founded for a larger media company called Forum Communications Co. In short, Modulist is an online paid content processing platform that works on behalf of newspapers all across the country. We take user submitted content such as obituaries, wedding announcements and press releases, take the payment, turn them into publishable pieces of content and sent them back to the newspapers. Believe it or not, there is still a lot of these sorts of listings that get placed in local community publications.

Well, about late morning yesterday, my team informed me that the system was glitching and they were unable to process any paid obits for any of our clients, and that our consumers were experiencing user problems on the site too.

Now, this isn't unheard of. In our four years of existence, we've experienced a few short service outages before, but they were all caught in time and fixed within minutes. The longest service shortage I remember lasted at best 20 minutes.

But yesterday, this outage was obviously going to last longer than that because it already had by the time my team informed me. Making matters worse, our main computer developer who works on the site had taken the day off. ... And, oh, by the way, he also lives in Bulgaria, which is just about directly opposite us as to when business hours are. Often this works in our favor as he is able to update the site and "push code" when it is nighttime here. This means our users aren't affected, and our team is not prohibited from doing their jobs.

But this wasn't the case yesterday. The fact that our main developer was on PTO, halfway across the world made me start to sweat. I didn't know how we were going to get our site fixed in time so that we could get our clients' paid obituaries processed on their behalf. And the outage, although not revealed to the public, was dragging on way past our longest previous service outage.

In desperation, I reached out to our U.S. business representative of the company we use to do our development. But after a few short minutes, he informed me that it was going to be very costly to have other developers not familiar with our company jump in to help. He called that scenario "breaking the glass," something they try to do only in the direst of circumstances.

Well, to me, it was a dire circumstance as I watched the unprocessed orders pile up, the client deadlines looming and my staff sweating it out. And it was in that moment that I reached out to God and prayed a desperate prayer: "God, please deliver us through this ordeal. Please help us find a way to make our business work today."

If my staff was sweating it, my stomach was in knots! ... Our business makes money by processing paid listings for newspapers, who make money from those very paid listings. And, so, if no listings are getting processed, we are not making money and our clients are not making money. That is a big problem!

So I prayed ... fervently! I asked God to intervene and help us find a way through the storm. But I admit there was doubt that crept into my brain too. This seemed an awfully selfish prayer. "Please God, help intervene in this business situation so that my team and the company we have worked so hard to build doesn't suffer!" ... After all, there are millions of people in far worse circumstances than waiting out a computer glitch.

Just as I was having a running internal debate over taking everything to God and wondering what's too selfish to bring to God, I received a text message back from our U.S.-based representative of our development company. Miraculously, despite it being close to the middle of the night in Bulgaria, our main developer had received our distress message, and was on line working it out. And not more than 30 minutes later, the issue was fixed, our team was processing orders again and none of our publishing clients was none the wiser. ... Our reputation as a solid, stable vendor company was in tact and maintained!

Some would say that all of this was coincidental, of course. You can blame away by saying that this developer often stays up late working because he can then take extra hours with his kids during the day. But I know in my heart that God intervened. It is really the only explanation.

But, even solid in that knowledge, a day later I find myself asking if there ever is a prayer that is too selfish to ask of God. Yesterday's prayer to help our business recover from the computer glitch seemed awfully close to me. But I also read a lost of scripture today that reminded me that God always wants us to be in prayer with him, even in the times that we struggle.

So, while I am grateful to my core that God helped our company yesterday, the internal debate over whether I was praying selfishly or not rages one. What do you think?