Does God show himself to us today?

Two weeks ago, I was having a conversation with my kids after supper regarding what they had learned in school and my six-year-old asked me, “Daddy, have you ever seen a garden spider?”

I told him that I had and he said, “I wish I could see a garden spider.” Without much thought, I said, “Well you could pray about it.” The prayer lasted all of three seconds and we continued on with our night, and from our perspective the prayer was forgotten.

Three days later my wife and family went to deliver some soup to an older couple from our church. During the visit the kids were asked if they wanted to go outside. As the couple gave a tour of their property, the highlight of the tour was the discovery of webs and painted bodies of two garden spiders. My family was a bundle of energy that night as they showed me the pictures and told me the story of the prayer that Heaven hadn’t forgotten.

At first the sighting of a small spider seems insignificant in the scheme of the whole universe, until we step back and realize all the factors that come into play. How could God get those spiders in exactly the right place at the right time? If we were to consider just a fraction of the variables, this small feat becomes an incredibly complicated and wonderful working.

When we go all the way back to creation, God created garden spiders in part for this one instance. Since creation those spiders had to survive for hundreds of years, their ancestors had to climb aboard the ark, and slowly migrate from Mount Ararat to southern Minnesota (spiders are not known for their quick migratory abilities). Once they arrived, their ancestors again had to exist for generations, survive droughts, floods, Minnesota blizzards, spin webs in just the right place so that enough nourishment could be caught to provide for the final generation that would be in view on a cold September day at just the right time for a child’s eyes to see. The enormous complexity of a simple ‘chance’ sighting for a child who had prayed can be multiplied by the other nearly infinite possibilities, and the end result is a God who had been thinking about a small child and his prayer for a very long time, since before the beginning in fact (Titus 1:2).

It is easy to doubt the power of God and wonder how much stronger our faith might be if we were beholding huge miracles like the Exodus or displays of God’s power like raising Lazarus. It is also easy to dismiss the miracles of the Bible amidst the tyranny of the mundane of our lives, but in reality the small answers to prayer and small miracles take just as much power and care as the big ones. God has been thinking about us for a long time, have we been thinking about Him?

“Many, O LORD my God, are thy wonderful works which thou hast done, and thy thoughts which are to us-ward: they cannot be reckoned up in order unto thee: if I would declare and speak of them, they are more than can be numbered.” Psalm 40:5