Small prayers that loom large for God

Photo by Ümit Bulut on Unsplash

We undervalue prayer so much that during our season of losing our son, we so commonly heard, ‘I’m so sorry, all I can do is pray.’ We would say, ‘that’s the best thing you could do.’

And we believe that by faith. So many believe it. We don’t know how or why prayer works, we just know it’s the way God works and cares for us.

But our prayers feel and appear to us as small. They might feel banal and unimportant, as if God might not think much of them, as if God disregards them, which says more about our doubting faith than it says about the mighty sovereignty of God.

Sure, not all prayers are answered as we would like. Most aren’t. But those prayers we pray that end in Jesus’ words, ‘Not my will, Lord, but Yours be done’, are always answered in the affirmative.

Surely God knows our hearts and loves us so greatly that He grieves that He cannot and won’t give us everything we want. He grieves most that we would want our plan over His. He opts instead to give us the very best — every loving impetus for growth in knowing we cannot coerce Him, and what growth it is when we accept what we cannot change, yet have the courage to change what we can.

Our small prayers matter to God no matter their infrequency. We can be confident that He who does hear them will set in place plans to give us what we need, even if those plans don’t always include what we want.

Even in our small prayers, God is working in the background of our lives for the future, in ways larger than we presently see, for our vision is so limited.

Small prayers, those ones we occasionally think go unnoticed and unheard, do loom large before our Creator God. He cares so much that He’s working on even bigger things that we truly need, not that He disregards what we want, because He knows our heart and exactly how we wish to be satisfied and content. He also understands how sin taints our vision and understanding, and He opts to give us something infinitely better — a relationship with His Son! — which is healing for this life and the next.