I Stopped Praying 25 Years Ago (Part 2)

If you participated in the series “Following the Evidence,” then what I am about to relate will seem familiar.

I have been sharing my spiritual struggle with prayer and the resolutions I came to. Among the many questions I wrestled with were how did God cope with all these individual relationships all at once? How could it be just Him & me? This conundrum passed away one day when I (an Australian), was sitting in a church in Brazil, not able to understand one word that was being spoken. I was there to worship and to listen to His Spirit. I had been reading two books that week and suddenly, as the Spirit of God Ministered to me, the two came together as one indelible thought. F.W.Boreham (The Luggage of Life) had asked how “ He who created the worlds and inhabits all time can have the patience to hear me speak to Him about my examinations, and my love affairs, and my prospects.” (p163) And which of us when we dared to be honest have not asked the same question about how God can hear millions of prayers all at once. The movie “Bruce Almighty” dealt with this in a powerful yet humorous way. That movie shot to the top of my favorites list.

Our problem, when we ask this question, is that we conceive God in our own image and we make Him too small. The other book “In His Image” by Philip Yancey & Dr Paul Brand was discussing the complexity of the human body & particularly the brain. Through pages 109 to 137 of that book Paul & Philip drew the analogy of the human body as applied to the spiritual body of Christ. I however saw something different as the two books of the week came together on that Brazilian pew!

The brain, we are told, is performing 5 trillion operations every second coordinating the catalogue of 5 senses, plus all the other vital functions that are taking place, informing my brain of things like muscle tension, pressure on the joints and tendons. My brain knows the tilt of my head, the bend of my elbow, the position of my left foot. Other senses inform me of lunchtime, bladder & bowel capacity. Below the conscious there are automatic controls on temperature, blood pressure, infection control and a multitude of chemical processes.

Five trillion operations per second! Apparently, billions of computations are required to recognize a piece of music in just seconds. Recognizing the distance between a ball and the moon are processes that occur with blinding speed and no conscious effort. As you sit here reading this your eyes are capable of interpreting your environment with a complexity the beggars the imagination and defies the evolutionists, because no evolutionist can explain what a half-evolved eye was doing while it waited eons to be switched on in working order. 127,000,000 cells, called rods and cones, line up in rows as the “seeing” elements that receive light and transmit messages to the brain. The rods are so sensitive that the smallest measurable amount of light, one photon, can excite them. At optimum conditions the eye can detect a candle at 20 kilometers. Your ears are processing sound as you sit here, picking up the slightest movement around you. Your ears can recognize 300,000 tones. All this is done by vibrations in the ear, that the brain must then interpret. There are 25,000 auditory cells in the ear, and these are connected by thousands of neurons (wires) to the brain.

Your sense of smell goes beyond the world of quantifiable physics and approaches mystery. Your nose can detect one garlic molecule in the waftage of 50,000 other molecules. Humans are capable of distinguishing 10,000 different odors.

A mere gram of brain tissue may contain as many as four hundred billion synaptic junctions. As a result, each cell can communicate with every other cell at lightning speed – as if a population far larger than the earths were linked together so that all the inhabitants could talk at once. The brain’s total number of connections rivals the stars and galaxies of the universe. It is as if there were ten billion bureaucrats constantly ringing each other about plans and instructions for keeping a country running. Every nerve cell in the brain has up to ten thousand of its own private lines!

Then I said to myself, if this is all going on in my head, consider then Him who is infinite and in whose image we are made. If the brain between my ears can, with blinding speed, process 5 trillion actions per second how many prayers can God listen to per second. The answer is – I don’t know, but I have been taken to the edge of the chasm and bid to look beyond.

So, Is God great to the point of absolute infinity or is He not? If God is great to the point of absolute infinity, it follows, beyond all controversy that there is no stick or stone in all the universe of which He is not perpetually aware and conscious.

To put it in other words – if there is a feather or a straw blowing about in the solar system, which has for a fraction of a second, eluded His knowledge or escaped His observation, then, by just that amount, His greatness falls short of infinity. If therefore, I do really believe that God is not only great enough to be the generator of Universes and creator of everything, but great enough to be infinite, then I cannot help believing that no sparrow falls to the ground without his notice and that the very hairs of my head are all numbered! And just as every cell must relate to my body and remain in communication with it, so must I and so can I remain in contact with Him who made all these things, knows all things, hears my every word and even knows the thoughts and intents of my heart. He even hears my “spirit groanings that are unutterable”. So, I no longer go to the empty shrine, my spirit connects with the infinite to whom I can come boldly because of his Son who died for me.