“Prayer Versus Everything”

 

“Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer.”*

An ant invasion in the kitchen! Oh no! It was the final straw in a series of stressful events.

With several days of rain this past week, the little pests seemed to pour in from all parts of the kitchen. I had difficulty spotting their entry holes even when following them with a flashlight. No matter how many times I mopped them up, more kept coming in.

The whole kitchen was in disarray: everything was emptied out from a large cabinet under the counter top and stored in a couple of boxes in the middle of the kitchen floor; and the silverware drawer was taken out and put on a TV tray. But no matter what I tried, the ants persisted in coming.

We had to work our way around the boxes on the floor for nearly a week until things finally settled down and the ants disappeared. It was a great relief, especially for someone who likes to have an orderly house!

I always get a sinking feeling whenever an ant is spotted in the kitchen or anywhere in the house for that matter. They usually seem to appear at the most inopportune moment, causing an alarm to ring in my head because where there is one ant, most likely there is another. They seem to come in twos at first, before the rest of the gang shows up.

During the week of the ant invasion, I was praying for several situations that were heavy on my heart. Couldn’t worry about ants—so I turned that over to the Lord too. At least I was at peace while trying to get rid of them.

A few days later, TJ the lab and I were walking down the street when we stopped to talk to a woman who was outside trimming her shrubs. She was very friendly and told me that she was new to the neighborhood.

 “I just moved in last December. I have a job, and on top of all that I’m getting things around here in shape,” our new neighbor said, pointing to the yard.

She went on to tell me of some of the improvements that had been made already—cleaning up the basement including painting the tiled floor, hiring a crew to remove large trees and shrubs from the front yard and someone else to power wash the roof and eaves of the house. She was a busy lady, but she didn’t seem worried at all judging from the smile on her face.

As we were talking, I noticed the slogan on her t shirt, “Prayer vs. everything.”

“That is a good thing to remember,” I said… “to pray about everything.”

Then I asked her name.

“It’s Miss Angel.”

Well, her name seemed to fit her well! On the way back from our walk, I stopped to talk with her again and gave her a card with our contact information on it.  For the first time I noticed several angel garden ornaments outside. How nice to have an angel in the neighborhood!

Well, the slogan on her shirt caught my attention. Rather than “Pray about everything,” it was “Prayer vs. everything,” which implies that prayer can stand up to anything that comes against us.

In addition to being our main mode of communication with God, prayer is the offensive and defensive weapon God’s people use against Satan and all of the powers of darkness in his realm. This means praying in those David and Goliath kinds of situations when it seems as though problems tower over and threaten to defeat us, as well as in those times of “ant invasions,” little things that annoy and distract us.

There is nothing too great or too small for us to take to God in prayer. It is our best weapon, and when coupled together with faith and the word of God, prayer brings about victory. God hears our prayers!

“David said to Saul, ‘Let no one lose heart on account of this Philistine; your servant will go and fight him.’

Saul replied, ‘You are not able to go out against this Philistine and fight him; you are only a boy, and he has been a fighting man from his youth…’ 

(David) ‘The Lord who delivered me from the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear will deliver me from the hand of this Philistine.’” 1Samuel 17:32-33, 37 NIV

*Romans 12: 12 NIV