God Hears Our Prayers

“As for me, I call to God, and the LORD saves me. Evening, morning and noon I cry out in distress, and he hears my voice” (Psalm 55:16-17).

I am writing this as I work from Starbucks. Many of you know that I work out of a Starbucks a couple of hours every day. It’s not just the coffee. It’s the smells, the sounds, the atmosphere. For whatever reason I get my best work done in a cafe setting.

My wife wonders how I can concentrate with all the commotion and noise at a typical cafe.

There are around 8,000,000,000 people on planet earth right now. At any moment, there has to be thousands, if not millions of people crying out and praying to God at the same time. How is it even possible that God can hear our individual prayers amidst the noise and the cachophony of sounds of the millions of prayers? How can God separate out each individual prayers?

I think I get how that works. Starbucks shows me that every time I work at one.

You see, there are multiple conversations going on around me. There is the noise of all the workers and their machines. There is the activity of people entering and going. Yet, I have no problem concentrating.

Do you know where I can’t do this? It’s at home. It’s the church office.

I normally have music in the background because I don’t work well in total silence either. It tends to put me to sleep. Even when I wear noise cancelling headphones with music in the background, when I am at home the voices and activity penetrate my concentration. It is impossible to not hear my wife or kids. Impossible.

But at Starbucks, I don’t know any of the voices. I don’t care for the voices at Starbucks the way I care for the voices at home or in the church office.

That’s why when a parent is at a play ground and they hear their particular child cry out out of the dozens of kids at play and screaming and laughing, not only can the parent pick out their child’s particular cry but they are able to know in an instant whether the cry is a hurt cry.

Why? Because the voice of their beloved penetrates.

That’s how it is with God. Even though there are millions of voices that are lifted up, every one of those voices penetrates. God cannot ignore them. God cannot block them out because they are the voices of his beloved. And when a hurt cry is lifted up? Oh, man. God responds.

Starbucks…that’s how I know God hears our prayers.