The Little Things

So most of you will already know this from twitter, but my little sister Lanee Beth's weenie dog died last Friday :-( Sometime during the week Chewie(the weenie dog) was bitten by a snake (for the second time I might add) and didn't respond to the antibiotics. Mom had called me earlier in the week to let me know it wasn't looking good for Chewie. I knew Lanee would be heartbroken. When you are in fourth grade, your dog means the world to you! So I went to my fastest source of getting others to pray with me-twitter. Except right as I typed out the tweet, I suddenly felt silly. I mean, who is really going to pray for my little sister's dog. Can you even pray for dogs? I mean I know that you can, but in the grand scheme of things, a dog seems like a small thing. And then I found myself questioning whether or not God even pays attention to small prayers like that. I know that is terrible, but I just kept thinking, "I know this is a huge deal to Lanee, but compared to all the bigger problems in the world, how silly is it for me to be asking my friends to pray for my little sister's weenie dog. I mean, lets just be real for a second. We all know those kids from sunday school that always had a huge list of prayer requests like, "My fish was swimming funny yesterday" or "I lost my favorite toy" and whenever the sunday school teacher asked for prayer requests and they raised their hand, you just rolled your eyes because you knew it was going to be a whole list of seemingly unimporatant things. (hopefully I'm not the only one who ever felt that way or I look like a biiiig jerk right now.) The point is, I didn't want to be that kid via twitter, but I went ahead, and had a suprisingly large amount of people respond and say they were praying for my sister and her dog (which is just a wonderful example of the amazing community we have here, but thats another blog lol)

Anyways, I started digging through some blogs I read and my Bible to try to figure out how God responds to our small prayer requests and I was reminded of a story from 2 Kings. If you know me very well, or have ever read my blog really, you know I'm a BIG Old Testament fan, but 1&2 Kings are probably in the top 5 of my favorite Old Testament books. I was reminded of the story of the man and the floating Ax head.

Basically, just for some context, Elisha just healed Naaman of leprosy (which is a pretty big deal) and then Israel’s army is delivered from the Arameans(which is a very big deal.) After all these big things, the prophets following Elisha are chopping some trees. One of the men's iron ax head fell into the water. The guy starts totally freaking out because he had borrowed the ax head. So Elisha hears this guy freaking out and asks him where the ax head fell. The man takes Elisha to where he dropped the ax. Elisha cuts a stick, throws it into the water, and then the iron ax head starts floats to the top so the man can just reach down and lift it out of the water. Now I didn't learn much in Physics I or II, but I do know that iron isn't supposed to float in water, so obviously, it was a God thing.

This guy wasn't anybody special, I mean, he didn't even have enough money to buy his own ax, he had to borrow one from a friend, but God still cared about the things that were going on in his life. To anybody else, losing an ax head probably doesn't seem like a big enough deal for God to intervene. It's not like he was some important man who had leprosy like Naaman. However, the man was serving God where he was at in life. He was building a hope for the prophets so God's work could be furthered. Because he was one of God's children, God cared about the small things in his life, like the ax head, and lead Elisha to meet the man's need, no matter how trivial it seemed.

In the new testament, Jesus says we don't have because we don't ask, and when we do ask we ask with wrong motives. When we are truly serving the Lord, we aren't going to be seeking things that don't line up with that, but we are still going to have problems in our life that are trivial in the grand scheme of things (like the man and the ax head). Even though those things seem small, God cares, He listens, and He acts. In my case this week, He decided not to heal Lanee's dog, however, He brought the blessing of two new puppies into her life not even a week later. (and these are blurry pictures, but they are the cutest things ever!)  

Since I've learned this little lesson, I've been trying to talk to God about the small things. For me, its helped me have a more comfortable praying relationship with God already. I'm not trying to prepare what I need to tell God, and what is too small for him to worry about, I'm just talking to him, and it has helped me just start automatically talking to him a lot more. So I'd encourage you to start sharing the small stuff you worry about with God. Or even just the small stuff that drives you crazy! Talk to God about how much you don't like doing laundry and how you need a better attitude about it! Talk to God about how you really want to yell at that person who just cut you off in traffic. Talk to God about how you don't know what mother's day presents to get for the special ladies in your life! Because He cares about the small stuff :-)

MUCH LOVE!