It is a wondrous and mysterious thing indeed how God’s providence and His promises to answer our prayers fit together. Could it be that already in eternity God’s providence has taken into account the prayers that we will offer in time? [Could it be that somehow our prayers are ‘baked-in’, as it were?] Perhaps that’s how it works. But the mind and soul, the heart and the faith of the Christian need not break themselves in trying to unravel the mystery. God never asks us to do that. As so often, he tells us the what of a mystery but not the how; the how he often reserves to Himself.
Daniel M. Deutschlander
The Narrow Lutheran Middle
(pg 92)
