To me, one of the most essential and helpful things to know about God is that God is infinite. In my experience, all effective spiritual reasoning shakes down from this one significant fact. What I’ve additionally realized is that infinity is not only defined by the most distant beyond, including everything in the most over-arching way. It turns out that there are also infinite infinities on the head of a pin! This means we cannot be separated from or get outside of God, while infinity is also in every minute detail.
When I start my prayer with the vastness and all inclusiveness of God’s infinity, issues diminish until they cower back into the nothingness from which they came. When I acknowledge God’s presence and power in the infinitesimal intricacies of daily life, connection and healing happen as well. Feeling God’s immediate support, and seeing God’s hand continuously at play in all of creation, surrounded as we are by God’s infinitely incredible non-material ideas, is both liberating and comforting.
One thing I often tell people who doubt God’s reality, is for them to learn about the reproduction of algae. Yes, algae, that slimy, lowly, pond scum. God made it and loves it, although it is admittedly a much lesser spiritual idea than you or I. However, when you know something about algae, it is downright amazing that it exists. The reproduction process of this very ubiquitous, but tiny plant is so intricately complicated and tremendously improbable, it would take your breath away.
That it works at all is miraculous– amazing to us, but oh so natural to God. If God so cares for the algae, how much more so are we cherished? Indeed, God is not only at the farthest reaches of existence, but fully and incredibly acting microscopically in every aspect of the spiritual universe as well.
I had an experience that showed me God cares more about details than we usually think. It was when God told me where to buy drinking glasses. This was pre-internet, and we had hunted all over for affordable, classic, clear, water glasses. We couldn’t find any, and knew nowhere else to look. We were newly in this house, in an area that we didn’t know at all. One morning, when I was praying about more important things, God literally interrupted me to tell me where to get our drinking glasses. I was flabbergasted.
God gave me specific directions. We were going that day to an adjacent town we had never been to, in order to go to a store that sold upholstery fabric. So God told me to go down the road past that store for a mile, that there would be a shopping plaza on the right, and our drinking glasses would be found there. I knew God was telling me this; I hadn’t made up this conversation.
My husband was a sport, so we drove down past the upholstery place. The way was mostly just tree lined, until suddenly at the one mile mark, there was a shopping plaza on the right. It had a large clothing store, and a big luggage shop. There were no drinking glasses in those stores, but the directions had been so specific, and the plaza was just where I was told it would be, so we looked closer. Upon a more careful inspection, there was a third store there, a diminutive dollar store tucked compactly between the two bigger stores. And yes, they did have our perfect drinking glasses– exactly what we wanted in style, and for a terrific price. We were gobsmacked that the very same God who put the planets in their orbits would care about us getting what we needed on such a detailed level!
Before this, I had thought of God more like the sun just shining, not really familiar with each individual flower, but making all the difference to them nonetheless. Since then, I’ve realized we are each held in the palm of God’s hand and all the hairs on our head are numbered. We are as mutually linked as an image and likeness is to what it is being reflected– so close and intimate; not at all separated! Not only are the big generalities mirrored back, but every single detail is there, completely recognized, and replicated with focus and definition.
I keep returning to this beautiful realization that God takes exacting care of the smallest details. Indeed, God does dazzle us by consistently meeting our needs. This is true even though God is not rearranging or controlling material objects and circumstances. The examples in this post are merely metaphors for the myriad ways God insures our indelible, spiritual harmony. God is completely in charge of each one of Her ideas in both the most immense and the most minuscule sense.
God is not only afar off at infinity’s fringe, being large and in charge, but is forever near, truly at hand, as immediate as our next breath, governing every infinitesimal aspect with powerful, benevolent devotion. We cannot fall out of God’s immense protection, or get outside of God’s enormous help. Similarly, nothing is too small for God to affect, and no person or situation is ever separate from God’s intimately close, attentive care.
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9 Comments
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Now Polly, you know that just a few hundred years ago , your story woukd have demanded you being burned as a witch. Witches were often people with “sight”. People who saw past the restrictions of society. Glad you share your gifts today.❤️
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Thank you for sharing this. Very helpful!
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Loved this post! Made me smile!
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Thank you, gonna look into the algae thing. Reminds me of Sermons in stones and the universe in a grain of sand… lovely ❤️
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Lovely Polly!
I’ve had experiences of God’s direction too. My daughter asked me to find a silk flower spray for her wedding dress to replace the rather tacky brooch on it. I set off up to Oxford Street which is one of the main shopping areas in the West End of London. However, the wonderful haberdashery departments I remembered from my youth have shrunk to almost nothing and I was told that silk flowers were no longer available. After trying many department stores I took time out to pray to be shown where to look.
I had another shop to visit and the idea came to zigzag through the back streets to Covent Garden to this destination. On the way I passed through Berwick Street market and I found a little shop with just what I needed displayed in its window! I was in awe! There were two sprays, so I bought one. It was perfect, my daughter loved it and then sent me back a couple of weeks later to buy the second one to put in her hair!
“To those leaning on the sustaining infinite, to-day is big with blessings.” Mary Baker Eddy.-
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Wonderful.
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Thank you for bringing to light and sharing a undeniably important part of the one stupendous whole we all share…the countless ways beyond sight, and not to be missed always at hand. Beautiful example.
This reminds me in a very simple way of my Grandmother she often would express with her hand ✋ open with thumb and index finger about 6cm apart and say the little things of God no matter how small mean this much, then open up her arms wide to embrace a very huge space and say…which really mean this much….as a child it was easy to understand even in the sense of giving something small all relating to the big picture. -
Gobsmacked: me!!!
One of the best examples of your…thesis, today, is how God takes care of MY need for Enriching, Informative, Interesting, Exciting, Bountiful, Beautiful, inspiring, Funny, Creative, Unusual, Clever, Helpful, Spirited, Swell … O gosh…. Infinite ways this Post is wonderful to me!
I thank You, God, for this way you love me, her, and so many others!! Amen!!
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[…] Click here, and you can read an example of this in the second half of this past post, when I knew something I couldn’t possibly have known. This did not happen because I have an intuitive personality or because I had any experience. I had never been there before, and did not know it even existed. […]
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