Prayer…..

The individuals connection with significance.

Prayer is an amazing privilege we humans are afforded. We the created are given the awesome opportunity to engage with the Creator in a personal and meaningful relationship we call prayer.

To get this privilege into some kind of perspective, spend a clear, crisp, cloudless night gazing into the heavens, and consider the myriad of twinkling stars your eyes can see. To appreciate the scale of what you see, consider that if the Milky Way galaxy were the size of the continent of Europe, our solar system would fit into a coffee cup. Even at this moment there are two Voyager spacecrafts speeding towards the edge of the solar system at a rate of 100,000 miles per hour. For almost three decades they have been journeying out from earth, approaching a distance of 9 billion miles. When mission control beams a command to the spacecrafts at the speed of light, it takes thirteen hours to arrive. Yet this vast neighbourhood of our sun fits along with several hundred billion other stars and their minions in the Milky Way, one of perhaps 100 billion such galaxies in the universe. To send a light-speed message to the edge of that universe would take 15 billion years!

When confronted with thoughts such as these it would be so easy to flounder in a quagmire of human insecurity and insignificance, but the Bible re-affirms our unique relationship with God, when the Psalmist proclaims:

“When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars, which You have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him?” Psalm 8:3-4

An excellent question, as well as a reminder of exactly who we are as humans, a mere pinch of dust scattered across the surface of a nondescript planet. But, at the heart of all reality is God, an unimaginable source of both awesome power and amazing love. Confronted with such reality we have a choice, grovel in humanoid humility or, like the Psalmist, look up with confidence and proclaim;

“O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is your name in all the earth!” Psalm 8: 9

In the final analysis it is only as a result of the infinite mercy and eternal patience of God that our prayers produce quite amazing results in spite of our failures, weaknesses, limitations and human vulnerabilities.