God must be busy

I heard a song on the radio the other day. I don't know if it was a new song or if it was just the first time I had heard it. The artist sang about all of the troubles in the world. About the war, crime, gangs, problems at home and on and on. Needless to say, it was not a happy uplifting song, but it wasn't meant to be happy and uplifting.

What really troubled me about what they were singing was their reason for all of these problems: God must be busy. The artist sang about how terrible life is and how he keeps praying about things, but the problems don't disappear. God must be busy. Even going so far as to say that he is nothing more than a grain of sand in the eyes of God, that the creator of the universe doesn't have time to answer his prayers. God must be busy.

If I remember my Sunday school Bible lessons correctly, God knows the number of hairs on our head and the number of sparrows on the earth (Luke 12:6b-7). Do they think God is busy counting hairs and sparrows? What is it that is keeping God so busy if he doesn't have time to answer our prayers? Maybe He's playing hand ball with St. Peter, or a Father / Son outing on the other side of the universe.

By the time the song was over I found myself fighting that urge to yell at the radio. You know the feeling. Not an angry yelling, but a "what are you talking about, would you please wake up and start making sense" type of conversation. The trouble here isn't the size of the song writer's problems. It is the size of their God. Mr. Brookes and Mr. Dunn have told the world through their song that, to borrow from Dr. Seuss, That they are Horton and their god is a Whovillian. Of course the problems the Who's had wasn't that they weren't answering, it was that no one was listening. Hmmm..

Psalm 34: 17 tells us that God hears the prayers of the righteous And delivers them from their troubles. A wise friend once taught me that prayer is a conversation with God. A conversation is a two way street: talking and listening. This song gave us the artist's wish list prayer to God, which that's OK. It is good to ask God for peace in troubled times and for answers to your problems. But if you aren't going to wait long enough to listen for the answer you might as well be talking to a wall.

If you believe what the Bible says, then you believe that God is all powerful and all knowing. He knows our past, present and future. The part where we all seem to have a problem is that God also knows what is best for us better than we do. Sometimes we don't like God's answer to our prayer. Sometimes he doesn't wave his magic wand and make our problems go away. Sometimes he answers our prayers, and the answer is "no". Ouch!

But who am I to question God? I don't think God is the one here that is too busy. God is there, listening and answering. Are we waiting around long enough to hear? Are we willing to grow and accept the answers God gives us? For the sake of our world, let's hope so.