New Years resolutions are a funny thing. Every January 1st begins with high hopes and intentionality. We make lists of grand, sweeping changes we “resolve” to make in our health, relationships, or ambitions. “From now on,” we tell ourselves, “I will exercise for 30 minutes, six days of the week… and I’m cutting out carbs! And dairy! And sugar!” You know what happens next because we’ve all done it. Months, weeks, or even (pitifully) days into our new lifestyle, we miss a day, then a few, and, eventually, we give up and call ourselves silly for thinking we could change all our habits overnight.
That may sound cynical to some, but there’s a reason this is such a ubiquitous cliche of a failure. We imagine complete, radical transformation when, perhaps, our focus ought to be on one, small, seemingly insignificant step. If we fail that one step, we can easily brush it off and try again. But when the perfect ideal has all of our attention, we get discouraged by the smallest stumbles and slip-ups that we feel tempted to quit.
This isn’t actually a speech about New Years resolutions. It’s actually about miracles. When it comes to praying for God to work a miracle, it is our tendency to imagine something like a complete, radical transformation of our problem. We want the cancer to disappear, or our marriage suddenly restored, or an anonymous cash gift in the exact amount we owe for rent. And let me say, “Yes” and “amen!” to such prayers. God can and does affirmatively answer these requests, probably more often than you think. But if we only ever pray for grand, sweeping change in our situation, we may accidentally fail to pray for the smaller, relatively insignificant miracles and, therefore, miss an opportunity to give Him thanks.
For example, just yesterday I was on our living room couch, reading a book when my 7-year-old asked to play a football game he downloaded on my phone. I said, “Sure,” so he happily plopped down next to me on the couch with my phone, and I went back to reading. It wasn’t more than two sentences later when I felt his little hand tapping my arm. “Dad! I got a touchdown!” He eagerly turned the phone to show me the replay. I watched and exclaimed, “Woah! Already?! Way to go, bud!” I went back to reading.
Then, about two sentences later… <Tapping on my arm> “Dad! Look!” I praised him with a smile and went back to reading.
Two sentences… <tapping> “Dad!” (Looking up) “Wow!” Back to reading.
Two sentences… <tapping> “Dad look!” (Looking up, notably without the smile this time) “Man! That’s great.” Back to reading.
Two sentences… <tapping> “Dad look!” <audible sigh> “Ok, bud.”
It was probably the eighth or ninth time around this cycle when I noticed the veins in my neck swelling with my rising pulse and I knew something had to give. I felt an impatient outburst coming but instead I took a deep breath and whispered a short prayer under my breath. I simply said, “Jesus, please give me the kind of patience you show towards me.” And immediately, it was like the reset button was pushed on my anxiety levels, and I was able to happily put the book down to give my boy the undivided attention he was craving.
Granted, I stupidly picked my book up again a few minutes later and failed to be so patient the next time he tapped my arm, but the point is this: it wasn’t a story about a paralytic suddenly able to throw his crutches and run a lap around the house, but it was an answer to prayer no less. If by “miracle” we mean that God intervened, then that was, no doubt, a miracle.
I wonder how often we would see God’s answers to prayer if we consciously looked for Him in the smaller things.
Look for Him this weekend! Ask Him to open your eyes to the ways He so constantly provides for you. Give thanks wherever you notice Him at work–in big things and small.
Your brother,
Ryan
1 Eric Metaxas, Miracles, 12.
2 Metaxas, Miracles, 38: That’s because the size–or really, the mass–of a planet determines how much gravity is has, which determines much else…. If Earth were slightly larger, it would of course have slightly more gravity, which has interesting implications. It’s not just that a person who weighs 150 pounds would weigh more. It’s that if Earth had just a little bit more gravity than it now has, methane and ammonia gas, which have molecular weights of sixteen and seventeen, respectively, would remain close to our surface. Since we cannot breathe methane or ammonia, which are toxic, we would die. More to the point, we would never have come into existence in the first place. If you’re thinking we might have evolved to where we could breathe those gases, that’s more science fiction than reality. Simply put, life cannot coexist with large amounts of methane and ammonia. But if Earth were just a bit larger, these deadly gases would not dissipate into the atmosphere but would stay right down here where we would have to inhale them.
On the other hand, if Earth were a tiny bit smaller and had a bit less gravity, water vapor, which has a molecular weight of eighteen, would not stay down here close to the planet’s surface but would instead dissipate into the atmosphere. Obviously, without water we couldn’t exist. As we’ve all heard, our bodies are 75 percent water. To think that the size of Earth must be almost exactly what it is or we wouldn’t exist is sobering and, frankly, not so easy to believe.
3 Metaxas, Miracles, 40: If the “Earth rotated ever so slightly slower, the temperature swings between night and day would be inescapably deadly… If our planet rotated a bit more quickly and therefore gave us shorter days, it would produce impossibly high winds. Just how high, we cannot say. Winds on Jupiter are routinely one thousand miles per hour, so if Earth rotated slightly faster than it now does, we may conservatively imagine that it would produce winds sufficient to make impossible a stable environment conducive to life of any kind.”
4 Metaxas, 43-44.
5 Metaxas, 48-49. “But to say that it was controlled or precisely calibrated can hardly begin to explain the degree of control involved. In fact, the speed at which the cosmos expanded out of that microdot in question was so outrageously perfectly calibrated that physicists say it constitutes the ‘most extreme fine-tuning yet discovered in physics.’”
6 Metaxas, 51. The same guy who coined the term “Big Bang” (Hoyle) discovered that “the nuclear ground-state energy levels (The lowest energy level of an element) of helium, carbon, oxygen, and beryllium had to be extraordinarily fine-tuned for enough carbon to be created.” And that’s just carbon! Hoyle, an atheist, later wrote that the notion that this fine-tuning had “just happened” was statistically impossible, such that it gave an overwhelming implication of a “guiding intelligence,” and that this, more than anything else, had “greatly shaken” him and his atheism. Hoyle said, “A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The number one calculator from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”
7 Metaxas, 51-52, referencing theoretical particle physicist Paul Davies, who has himself said that “the impression of design is overwhelming.”