Working with God!

Philippians 4:6

Have no anxiety about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.

The amazing thing about today’s verse is that it is not amazing to us.  Behind today’s verse stands an entire conception of the universe that is simply astounding, when you think about it.  Millions upon millions of people around the world labor under the illusion that the universe is a gigantic piece of clockwork.  According to this worldview, everything that happens is caused by something else in the clockwork happening which was caused by something else in the clockwork happening and this process can be traced all the way back to the Big Bang.  There’s not a lot of room for prayer in that cosmic fall of deterministic dominos.  And yet, Jesus and his apostles tell us to pray, which ultimately means that the clockwork universe must go.  Logicians object to this with complaints like, “Since God knows everything already, there is no need for you to pray.”  Jesus replies to this with delightfully Jewish logic and says, in essence, “Since God knows everything already, you can tell him anything.”  The upshot of the New Testament teaching on prayer, in short, is that the universe is a free work of art, not a vast machine and that we are children of God who work in cooperation with our Father, not cogs, statistics, data input assistants, or factors in an equation.  For that, let us give thanks.

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Mark P. Shea is a popular Catholic writer and speaker. The author of numerous books, his most recent work is The Work of Mercy (Servant) and The Heart of Catholic Prayer (Our Sunday Visitor). Mark contributes numerous articles to many magazines, including his popular column “Connecting the Dots” for the National Catholic Register. Mark is known nationally for his one minute “Words of Encouragement” on Catholic radio. He also maintains the Catholic and Enjoying It blog and regularly blogs for National Catholic Register. He lives in Washington state with his wife, Janet, and their four sons.

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