Inviting God into Every Detail of Our Lives
By Jasmin Howell
“…the divine life of the believer is made up of a vast number of little circumstances and little things. Every day there come before us a variety of little trials, and if we seek to put them aside in our own strength and wisdom, we shall quickly find that we are confounded. But if, on the contrary, we take everything to God, we shall be helped, and our way shall be made plain. Thus our life will be a happy life!”
George Müller
My anxiety was rising as I rifled through every possible place I could think of. After two days of searching, I was still coming up empty-handed. I dug around in the garage, in my junk drawer, in the pile of hardware, in the purse I had worn to the store to measure for a new hinge … everywhere I could think of. Amid the task of refinishing a large dining hutch for a friend (who was also a paying customer), I had promised new black hinges to complete the updated look, but unfortunately the ones I had purchased didn’t fit properly and my attempts to find a suitable alternative had failed. It seemed the only option was to spray paint the original gold hinges black.
But one was missing. One. And my friend wanted to pick the hutch up the following day.
I sat down on the couch with my head in my hands. I was so stressed. Due to pregnancy, sickness, and life interruptions, the refinishing project had taken six months longer than planned to complete. I was expecting a baby very soon, my friend’s patience was understandably running out, and other projects also needed my attention.
I was utterly aware that in the grand scheme of things my problem was incredibly small. But in my mind and heart and life circumstances at that moment … it was large.
As I sat there, the Lord brought to mind numerous other times that I had called out to Him for help in similar, relatively small moments of need, and He had answered. In fact, my strong belief that He cared so much for me as to desire even the smallest, most meager prayer from my lips had only grown more certain over the years as I had seen Him answer so many of the “little things” (as George Müller calls them) with perfect care and provision.
So I prayed, “Lord, I know You see all things, big and small. And I know that this little missing hinge — which is causing me so much stress — is not hidden from Your sight. Please help me find it!”
Minutes passed when I suddenly felt inspired — check your coat pockets. I hopped up and suddenly remembered being at the hardware store months earlier and receiving a compliment on the long, camel-colored overcoat I had been wearing. I dug into one pocket of that same coat and my fingers instantly closed around the missing metal hinge!
“I found it!” I cried triumphantly, jumping around like a maniac (which is saying something for a woman who is six months pregnant). “Thank You, Jesus!” I cried, knowing that He had provided the inspiration for where to look and had taken care of this need in my life, as trivial as it might have seemed. And, in the process, by laying my small trouble before Him and then watching Him bring the answer, my faith increased!
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Praying, even for the small things, has four incredible effects in the life of a Christian:
1. Prayer Reminds Us That We Belong
Prayer — yes, even in the smallest, most meager sense of the word — is our daily reminder that we have a spiritual citizenship that cannot be taken away, as is so beautifully described in Hebrews 4:16. Because of Jesus Christ we should approach the “throne of grace with confidence so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need” (Heb. 4:16 NIV). Notice that the verse doesn’t provide any guidelines for what size of need qualifies to be brought before the throne … just that we should approach with confidence.
I got to thinking on this topic more deeply a number of years ago while speaking with a friend who was dealing with a small, personal matter that was discouraging her. Despite having this need, she felt overwhelmed watching some horrific events unfolding overseas and expressed to me that she struggled to understand why God would care about her small problem when the world was such a mess. “How can I ask God to help me with this tiny thing when people are being killed even as we speak? It seems so selfish!”
And yet, this way of thinking brought her immense discouragement, thinking that God had His hands too full elsewhere to bother with her concerns. And she’s not alone! When faced with what we label as small, insignificant issues in our lives, many of us can be tempted to dismiss them as unworthy to bring before God. We can bring to mind others struggling with far weightier concerns: a family short on money to buy food, a pregnant friend facing a scary diagnosis, a marriage on the rocks, and that doesn’t even account for all of the larger issues in the world — wars, political upheaval, and Christian persecution, to name a few.
The enemy works overtime to diminish our understanding of God and the depth of His care, trying to convince us that we don’t matter in light of our smallness and His greatness. God is big, important, and busy. And we are small, needy, and irritating. This ploy of the enemy is like trying to convince a citizen of a country that they don’t actually have access to the inherent rights and protections of their citizenship. Through this deception, we can allow ourselves to be convinced that we can’t come to God with whatever our needs might be, in which case we end up discouraged!
But we do belong to God, and coming before the throne of grace for anything and everything reminds us of that relationship and provides the avenue to enjoy it.
Thankfully, God doesn’t need us to protect Him! While we may become easily overwhelmed by the weight of the world’s needs, He most certainly is not. Let me encourage you to take your every need to Him, no matter how insignificant you feel that it is!
2. Prayer Increases Our Fellowship With God
As it says in 1 John 3:19–20, “…we are of the truth and reassure our heart before Him; for whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and He knows everything…” (ESV). God already knows every intricate thought of our hearts, so what purpose would there be in shelving even our smallest concerns, pretending they don’t matter to us when He already knows that they do?
I love this encouragement from C.S. Lewis in the area of prayer:
“We are always completely … known to God … We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us … those who do not turn to God in petty trials will have no habit or such resort to help them when the great trials come, so those who have not learned to ask Him for childish things will have less readiness to ask Him for great ones. We must not be too high-minded. I fancy we may sometimes be deterred from small prayers by a sense of our own dignity rather than of God’s.”
Prayer is fellowship. It is our means of conversation with God. And as Lewis describes, it develops a habit in us of routinely inviting Him into the daily, even mundane, aspects of our lives. Doing this in the small circumstances of our everyday lives increases our confidence to ask bigger, bolder, more audacious things of God in faith.
Have you ever observed a friend struggling in a difficult situation, but not confessing the depth of that struggle to you? You observe it, but you’re not invited into it. And that can place a barrier to the growth of a friendship. And yet, once that friend finally expresses the true nature of her struggle, you are then able to truly comfort and help her by means of her invitation. The relationship grows through that shared confidence and trust.
Likewise, God is a Friend who observes and knows every detail of our lives. If we resist sharing our needs in prayer, we actually put up a barrier in our fellowship with God. Unlike an earthly friend, He can still work in amazing ways even in our hesitance to invite Him in, but when we extend that invitation, we begin to enjoy the depth of relationship with Him that He intended for us to have: love, wisdom, and comfort without limit. Our relationship with Him grows sweeter each time we trust Him with the contents of our hearts and minds.
3. Prayer Allows Us to Notice His Unfolding Answers
Let’s go back to the story about my missing hardware for a minute. Asking the Lord to help me find a tiny gold hinge, not more than three inches long, in no way diminished His ability to care for someone else’s major life crisis elsewhere in the world. But what it definitely did do was to make me more aware of His ability to answer and tune my heart to watch what His answer might be. And when He answered my prayer, it reminded me of His incredible character and caused me to rejoice!
In Psalm 34, David describes himself as a “poor man” who sought the Lord and took refuge in Him, and the Lord answered and made his face radiant with joy. But even more importantly, this experience helped David taste and see that the Lord is good. He didn’t just acknowledge this truth with his mind. He had a fully immersive experience of God’s goodness by seeing Him mightily answer prayer: “I sought the Lord, and He answered me and delivered me from all my fears. Those who look to Him are radiant, and their faces shall never be ashamed. … Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good!” (Ps. 3:4–5, 8 ESV).
When we mark His answers, we actively take notice of His work in our lives. It is said that George Müller (who I quoted earlier, and whose life was dedicated to the work of caring for orphans in England) kept a detailed prayer journal with “…two page entries, one page for requests and the opposite page for God’s answer. He dated every entry, so no one would question that God had answered. Müller calculated that during his lifetime fifty thousand of his requests were answered.”
The incredible thing to note about fifty thousand prayers being answered is that the vast majority of these would have been for the small, everyday needs of Müller’s ministry. And, as a result, his testimony powerfully shows the way in which God met those prayers with a lifetime of answers — evidence of His great love and endless supply!
4. Prayer Increases Our Faith
If you aren’t sure you see God working in your life, or you feel your faith in Him is timid or unsure, my question to you would be this: Are you inviting God into the smallest details of your day? Even if it looks like my simple prayer for help to find a missing item. And then, are you observing His answers?
If not, I strongly believe that you are missing out on the sweetest opportunity to increase your faith in the One who made you, who knows each hair on your head, and who “knows what you need before you ask Him” (Matt. 6:8 NIV).
The answers to prayer that George Müller observed throughout his lifetime greatly increased his faith in God’s perfect provision, and his increasing faith would have also increased the strength of his prayer life and spurred him on to continue in prayer! The same will be true for us, and it has certainly been so for me in my walk with the Lord!
Since you have access to God through faith, don’t allow the enemy to convince you that your small things don’t matter to God or that you don’t have a place before His throne. Don’t diminish God’s power by withholding your little, daily requests from Him because you believe Him to be too busy dealing with the weightier problems of this world. Don’t forget that He is your Father, and He says: “Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? … how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask Him” (Matt. 7:9–11 ESV). Our needs can feel as small and insignificant as bread and fish. But our Father delights to give good gifts to those who ask. Even fifty thousand of them and more!
His Word is our invitation, our prayers are our communion with Him, and His answers to all that concern us demonstrate that not even the small things escape His loving attention.
This article was originally published in Issue 44.
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