At university, I had a friend who, nestled in the middle of so many postcards and pictures, had one particular poster on her wall. It had a photograph of a small kitten peeking out of a rose bush with a rather worried look on its face and was captioned “God hears even the smallest voice”.  Why should I, a decade later, still think of this one poster out of the hundreds of others that I’ve seen with Christian verses and thoughts? Many of these other posters have rich colourful photographs of majestic landscapes: mountains, rivers or meadows, complete with verses from Psalms or modern authors, whose imagery binds these natural wonders to the Bible - “His foundation is in the holy mountains” [Psalms 87:1]. In truth, these words and pictures all look wonderful on a wall, but few of them have such a comforting and long-lasting personal message as ‘God is listening’.

 

Prayer is one of the fundamental pillars of faith but it’s not a one way conversation. Jesus said “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you” [Matthew 7:7]. God is always there to comfort the needy, the tired, the sick or lonely. No matter where you are, if you need help, let God know.   

 

In the hard times, when there are choices to be made, it’s not easy to trust God, to know that He is with us in what we do. In fact having faith is probably the hardest thing of all; how easy it is to feel alone or to have doubts every single day.  When God doesn’t answer our prayers straight away or things don’t work out as we had wanted, it’s easy to become disheartened and wonder why - as the Christian author and speaker, Rob Bell puts it, “God if you just give me this then I’d be OK, then my life would be OK” [Nooma Ep.006]. But God really does know which way is best, even if it doesn’t seem like it at the time. Simply, He can see the bigger picture and He knows when the time is right. We just have to wait and trust Him that it will all work out.

 

One of my favourite verses in the Bible comes from Isaiah: “Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying ‘This is the way; walk in it’” [30:21]. In life, we will always have difficult decisions to make and times of need, but may you know the love of God and may He hear your smallest voice when you come to the crossroads and don’t know which way to turn. For He is there, behind us all the way, yet knowing the path ahead.