I couldn’t sleep for four days. Every evening that week, I pulled the bed covers up to my chin, closed my eyes, and resigned myself to the endless yapping of my brain. When I did manage it, the sleep was uneasy, beset with dreams and too quickly broken. I became something of a sourpuss, dragging my feet through each day with an anxious spirit and a ready complaint on my tongue. There was, however, an end date to all this stress. At eleven o’clock on a Thursday morning, I was scheduled to audition for the worship team at my church.

The day before the audition, I was struck with a rather sheepish realisation. I had spent the past four days (ninety-six hours) stressing over what would amount to twenty minutes of my life. When I pressed myself for a reason, I found that I’d attached a great deal of meaning to those twenty minutes. How they unfolded would determine not only the shape of my calendar this year, but also the measure of my skill, the weight of my worth, the question of whether I could belong. Somehow a twenty-minute audition had turned into an appraisal of my name.

David Powlinson offers a wonderful illustration of this phenomenon in his reflection on Psalm 131. “Do you remember Alice in Wonderland,” he asks, “how Alice was either too big or too small? Because she was never quite the right size, she was continually disoriented. We all have that problem. We are the wrong size.”[1] How many of our anxieties spring up from this incongruence—the size of our selves clattering against the size we think we are! Preaching on the same psalm several centuries prior, Charles Spurgeon describes the fretful infant who kicks and wails because she wants to get the entire Atlantic into her hand. But of course, “a little child’s palm cannot hold an ocean.”[2]

I open an essay on prayer with these reflections because prayer and size are intimately connected. Consider, for example, the Lord’s Prayer, which draws us immediately into the sphere of the divine — that is, the presence, name, kingdom, and will of God. As we linger on these lines, our world begins to expand—or perhaps more accurately, our vision of that world expands. We adjust our gaze to a reality much greater than ourselves, and in so doing, we discover parts of our lives beginning to shrink, and others to grow, in comparison. When I approach God in prayer, all that once troubled me during the week—my concerns, uncertainties, and indeed, I myself—become the “right” size: smaller than I’d thought in the presence of a vast and powerful Creator, yet somehow sizeable enough for his loving care and attention. This latter point is crucial. Far from minimizing our very real trials and temptations, prayer relativizes them, wresting our worries, problems, and pains from our fumbling arms and placing them into the much more capable hands of our Father in heaven.

That God wishes to take our troubles upon himself is both a wonder and a great comfort. For the Lord ensures that we, too, make it into his prayer. “Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses.” We are discovered in our smallness, needy for physical and spiritual nourishment, and vulnerable to the perils of life all around us. In teaching us to ask for our “daily bread,” Jesus gently disallows us from hurtling our little selves into the future (as though we could handle such a move!). Instead, like the psalmist’s weaned child, we are asked to wait patiently for our food where and when we are, that is, this very moment, trusting that, in Dallas Willard’s words, God will “give us today the things we need today.”[3] A little child’s palm cannot hold an ocean, but his certainly can.

I had been fasting as part of twenty-one days of prayer with my church when I came to my silly revelation about the audition. Abstaining from food tends to compound the sense of dependence that is cultivated in prayer. I remember thinking—perhaps a bit stupidly in my hunger—how utterly limiting it is to be a human being, limiting not only in the sense that my body needs food to function, but in a much more basic sense that I am in fact a body. Confined to a single point in time and space, I often find myself wishing that God would multiply the hours the way he multiplies bread. I want more time to learn and read and write. I want more time to meet with people, serve the church, see God’s kingdom come. I want to be bigger than I am. But as I fasted and prayed, I was overcome by the reality of Yahweh’s immensity and timelessness. He is not bound by anything. He does not “need more time” to accomplish his purposes. If my earnest hope is that his mission would be realised in my life, I do not need more time. I need only his presence and the readiness to be led where and when he leads me.

Prayer brings us down to size in ways we desperately need today. We already know the truth of this. We know that the kingdom belongs to little children. What George Herbert wrote of Holy Scripture applies just as much to prayer: “Heav’n lies flat in thee, / Subject to ev’ry mounters bended knee.”[4] So we come with bended knees. In prayer we experience what is perhaps one of the sweetest gifts of our faith—a fresh, lived encounter with the good news of a big, big God drawing near.  

[1] Powlinson, “‘Peace, be still’: Learning Psalm 131 by Heart,” in the Journal of Biblical Counseling, vol. 18, no. 3 (Spring 2000), p. 4.

[2] Spurgeon, “The Weaned Child,” from Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, Volume 21, 1970.

[3] See Willard, The Divine Conspiracy, HarperOne, 1997.

[4] Herbert, “The Holy Scriptures I,” in George Herbert: Selected Poems, Bloomsbury Publishing, 1997, p. 29.

First published with the title “The Child’s Palm” in the Et Cetera at Regent College, 4 February 2025. Revised 7 February 2025.