Whether or not we mean to, most of us have a habit of making God smaller than he really is. “Everyone approaches God with a set of preconceptions gleaned from many sources,” says Yancey. “Church, Sunday school lessons, stray comments by believers and skeptics alike.” Such images aren’t necessarily a bad thing. After all, without mental images of some kind, it would be impossible to think about God at all.
But we need to remember that the God who we clothe in these images is in truth much bigger than we can actually imagine. When we’re not shrinking God down, we’re often busy doing just the opposite, shrinking ourselves down, pretending that God is too big and too important to hear us. Who am I to bother God with my problems? We ask, God doesn’t have time to listen to me.
Wrong. When we pray, we are entering God’s time—eternity. And eternity is very different from time as we ordinarily experience it. rather than picture God as a busy switchboard operator juggling incoming requests, we should think of him as a deeply relaxed and sympathetic listener, a powerful who can absorb all of our thoughts and prayers and needs. To enter God’s time is to accept that he is always available. He’s not hiding way off in the future. God is available now.
And as Yancey puts it, “The common question, “How can God listen to millions of prayers at once?” betrays an inability to think outside time. God’s infinite greatness, which we would expert to diminish us, actually makes possible the very closeness that we desire. A God unbound by our rules of time has, quite literally, all the time in the world for each one of us.” – Ptolemy Tompkins, Senior Editor
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