Small Dramas

Some spiritual experiences are useful to share. Others, I find, I am better off keeping to myself, not because they are trivial but because they are personal, just between me and the Lord. Also, more than a few of these experiences are easily misunderstood.

An example. This morning I wake at 2:15 a.m., as is often the case. I know I’m either up for the day or at least for the next few hours. Long experience has proven trying to go back to sleep when I’m wide awake is wasted time. Upstairs, I can hear my son struggling with what turns out to be an uncooperative file conversion (he works overnight from home), and I overhear an uncharacteristic expression of frustration pass his lips.

Naturally, I go up and intrude. Come on, you would too.

My son, who is a believer, tells me he’s been trying everything he knows how to do for almost an hour. Nothing is working. The senior guy on his shift is off for the night, and there’s nobody on staff anywhere on the company’s global network who could troubleshoot the file for him if he escalates the issue. My own expertise in such things is limited and slipping away from me with the passage of time. I don’t do that work anymore. And of course the file must be released to the client for the morning, no ifs, ands or buts. That’s always the way it is with this job when you run into trouble.

So I sit down in a comfy chair behind him and take the situation to the Lord, just silently, in my own heart, no bells and whistles. My son can’t even see me do it. No credit to me for praying, it’s just something I learned to do in moments of quiet desperation when I was doing the same sort of work myself and came to the end of my resources. Where else am I going to turn? Just a few seconds of prayer asking for grace and help from Heaven for my son in doing his job to the best of his ability. Lo and behold, five minutes later, he turns around with a smile. Problem solved.

Now, did the Lord do that?

Good question. I may never have a definitive answer to that. It’s certainly possible. It’s also entirely reasonable to suppose that the successful “fix” that occurred to my son after an hour of trying and failing would have popped into his head even if I had never gotten out of bed or thought to ask him about his trouble, and even if I had never taken it to the Lord. There’s absolutely no way to know for sure.

I know exactly what I would hear if I mentioned what just happened to my unbelieving former coworker: she’d simply say it was the luck of the draw and that prayer had nothing to do with it. On a grumpy night, she might call it “confirmation bias”, assuming she is familiar with the term. There would be zero value in sharing my overnight experience with her, even though we still text all the time. I also know what I would probably hear if I shared the story with various Christian friends. One or two would worry that attributing the solution to the Lord with any degree of certainty is a bit superstitious. Others would be unsure how to react. A few pious souls would enthuse about God’s grace and assume no other answer was possible: of course the Lord did it. Praise be!

Knowing that each of these folks would answer in accordance with their own current convictions about how the Lord works, and that all their opinions about it would be (1) at variance with one another, and (2) as completely devoid of actual data as my own, I elect to keep the story to myself.

In the end, I have no clue how my son’s problem got solved (perhaps he prayed about it before I did), but I thanked the Lord from the bottom of my heart anyway for an answer to prayer, however it came about. Does the Father care about his children enough to provide a solution to a relatively small difficulty in the dead of night? Surely he does. Is the Father able to solve the problem? Of course he is. Might he have done so? Absolutely. Is he worthy of my praise either way? Most certainly.

So, yeah. That’s one relatively insignificant incident in a very average Christian life. But small dramas like this play out every day in the experience of believers all over the world. Walking with the Lord for the last forty years or so has given me a mental inventory of hundreds of such apparent answers to prayer, some more wildly improbable than others, some absolutely impossible apart from the timely intervention of Heaven. I have probably forgotten as many of these as I remember. I bet our readers all have their own stories they could tell if they were so disposed. It’s normal Christian living, I think.

I have shared a few of these anecdotes with others. Most I keep to myself. But I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that in prayer I possess a priceless resource unavailable to the unbelieving world and untapped by many a believer who might never think to take the small dramas of their lives before the throne of grace. It’s not this incident or any other on its own, in pairs or in trios that persuades me. It’s the avalanche of tiny miracles that accumulate over time.