Right now, a group from our church is visiting Israel, and as a result I’m supremely jealous and living vicariously through all their photos! While there, they visited the Wailing Wall – if you aren’t familiar with this, one of the ‘traditions’ is to write your prayer requests on a small piece of paper and leave it in between the crevices of the wall. My sweet pastor’s wife did this and included my name on her piece of paper, and I was truly touched by it.
It made me think, if I were standing there, what would be on my tiny piece of paper? I would probably consider only my “biggest” or “most important” prayers for this sacred moment. Which leads me to a misconception I think we all have about God – that He is very busy, and so when we come to Him for prayer, we must choose our prayers carefully, and only approach Him with the “big” stuff. We feel we have to carefully choose what goes on our tiny piece of paper to heaven, and that it would be silly to bother God with the “small” stuff.
It turns out we tend to view prayer the same way we view sin – as if there are “big” sins and “small” sins. Lying to your spouse is not “as bad” as having an affair. But the Bible clearly tells us that to God, all sin is the same. He is perfect so whether you “sin small” or “sin big”, both miss the mark of perfection – it doesn’t matter what the sin is, it’s still sin, and there are no “levels” in God’s eyes like we tend to think. Prayer works the same way – all the requests of our heart are equal, there are no big requests or small requests to God. The reason for that is because He cares for us so much.
God does not have some limited supply of power requiring that we carefully select only the “most important” concerns. His power is infinite. His love is infinite. He’s not “too busy” or “too big”. That’s why when we ask, He doesn’t simply meet our needs, He goes exceedingly and abundantly above what we could ask or imagine. We know this, so why do we still think we are “bothering” God with the little stuff?
Think about how busy you are. I bet you wish on a daily basis you had 3 hands or an assistant or more hours in the the day or even a clone so you could be in 2 places at once. But let’s face it – even if you did, that wouldn’t be enough to solve our “busy” problem. But imagine – what if you had infinite power? Over the whole universe? With the ability to actually be everywhere at every moment? I bet you probably wouldn’t feel so “busy” anymore, would you? Because if that were the case, you would actually have the capacity to meet all the needs. Well guess what…that’s God.
As humans, we are limited. We are forced to prioritize, forced to make choices about what needs and requests get addressed and what must go unfulfilled. We are forced to decide…for example, what happens when our baby takes a nap – do we eat, sleep, or shower? Doing the laundry doesn’t even make the top 3!
So we project this limitedness onto God, because that’s what we understand. As a result, we feel if He’s in charge of the whole universe, He must be awfully busy, and so we shouldn’t “bother” God with the small stuff. We feel silly asking the God of the universe to please help with just this one thing. When the truth is, it’s more ridiculous is to think we, limited humans, can tackle all these things on our own without help.
The truth is God is waiting, right now, to help with all the big things AND all the small things, you just have to ask. He has unlimited capacity, unlimited power, and unending love, and you aren’t “bothering” anybody. We don’t have to go to the Wailing Wall with our tiny paper of our most important requests, we have access 24/7 to ask for help with the longest list we can come up with, and He wants to meet all of our needs.
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