The following prayer was first published in Anabaptist World.
Dear FATHER, IN WHOM I try to believe, my heart feels muddled and squished, like a stress ball in a clammy hand. My mind is clouded by vague worries and muddied emotions.
It feels presumptuous to ask you, the Creator of sparrows and stars, into the small and ugly details of my thoughts. But here I am.
And here you are.
Your Word, the stories I’ve heard and the hopeful reaching of my muddled heart encourage me to believe that you are the God of the small and the broken.
We visit the nursing home — my children and I — to hand out the crosses we’ve colored.
A lady with a child’s peace on her face colors too, dipping from a drawer of crayons and markers. I see the purpose in her eyes and think that to you, O God, her work of filling in blanks must be as important as mine.
I fill my babies’ bellies. I fill a page with words. To someone as large as you, both our works must have equal meaning.
We meet a man curled in his Geri chair. I am not allowed to shake his hand. “He scratches,” they tell me and hurry me past.
A lady hardly taller than my 3-year-old daughter gives my children a stuffed bunny from the kindness of her heart.
“Do you have a home for me there?” another lady asks. “They’re mean to me here.”
She’s so like us all — from our muddled minds — reaching for a better reality, a place to belong.
Her question, to a God so large the stars are small, must carry equal weight as my own.
Is there a place for me? Do you have a purpose for me? Does someone love me?
Compared with the busyness and space of the outside world, these lives feel, at first blush, to have little meaning. Lives lived in small spaces, in broken bodies and muddled minds.
But isn’t that the story of our world? Isn’t this what each of us looks like to God? Broken bodies in a prison planet?
If you are the God of people at all, you must be God of the nursing home. If you care about me, you care about them. If you hear their questions, you also hear mine.
I am listening to the minor prophets on audiobook. Record after broken record of brokenness.
When the exiles returned from Babylon and rebuilt the temple in faith and devotion — even then they wept, because the temple was not what it once had been, not what the old ones remembered.
And you asked them, “Who has despised the day of small things?” (Zechariah 4:10).
EVERY MORNING, my sister calls me to pray. Many of the things we pray for seem self-centered — safety on the road, help to get through an overwhelming day, healing from a cold, a need for sleep.
Important enough to pray about? If you are God, you must be God of the mundane details.
Even in the wilderness, small things predominated. While you brought the people out with your mighty hand, they dealt with dusty clothing, dry throats, the same old food. The miracles we recount with awe came amid a thousand nights of mundane reality.
My sister and I pray also for problems I label as large — a friend’s depression, another friend’s addictions. Maybe because I was not there at the beginning of these problems, I find it hard to imagine an end to them.
But I think the God of the universe doesn’t see things as I do. What’s big to me might not be big to God. What’s small to me might not be small to God. The God of the universe is in all things, everywhere at once, and so the proportions look different.
And so I ask you, unapologetically, into the small and broken things.
I am sorry I don’t have more to offer. I am sorry my childhood dreams of telling people about Jesus have sprouted such small faith, such paltry action.
But to be the God of people, you must be God of the small and paltry. Because small and paltry is all we have.
I remember some lines by Isobel Thrilling:
It’s the tremor
we feel when children
in cardboard crowns
tell the Christmas story.
Cardboard crowns — what an apt description for our human efforts to represent majesty. And yet, in contrast to humble things, your glory shines brighter. In the presence of the King of all things, even cardboard gains value.
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Photo by Marianna Smiley on Unsplash