It’s natural for us to classify tasks before us in terms of degrees of difficulty. You may survey the week before you and give extra thought to a conversation that you need to have with a child, co-worker, or friend. You anticipate certain possible reactions, and know that it may cause tension. It’s more difficult than ordering a pizza to go. Or you may be pushing toward a deadline and know that making contact with the key people involved in pulling everything together will be a challenge. Perhaps you need to decide whether that major car repair is worth it. Do you spend a large sum to fix your car or get a newer model? Some tasks or decisions seem difficult, while others are simple and easy.

When our faith encounters difficulties, we tend to think in the same categories. We reason that a prayer for safety on a trip is easy for God to answer on a sunny day with dry roads and unlimited visibility. We consider this a more difficult challenge for God if we’re praying for a teenager who is traveling a long distance on ice at 2:00 a.m. Asking God to provide a job in a soft market is not as taxing on him as asking for a job when unemployment is way up. Requesting healing for a sprained ankle demands more of the Almighty than a similar request for the destruction of cancer cells.

One of the challenges of growing in faith is thinking differently about the abilities of God the Father and Christ our Savior. We have to remind ourselves of some of the scenes we see in scripture. In Matthew 15:29-30 we read, “Jesus left there and went along the Sea of Galilee. Then he went up on a mountainside and sat down. Great crowds came to him, bringing the lame, the blind, the crippled, the mute and many others, and laid them at his feed; and he healed them.”

We don’t know how many people Jesus restored, but it was probably many more than a few dozen. We learn in the following paragraphs that the crowd swelled to four thousand men, plus women and children. And the cross-section of maladies Matthew mentions suggests that Jesus faced most of what we would see in any hospital today. Typical of the Bible’s subtle language, Matthew says only, “and he healed them.” Those four simple words are profound. They remind us that none of the personal physical needs that Jesus faced were “difficult” for him as we use the word. Given the limitless nature of his power over life and death, such intervention was a simple reflection of his sovereignty over all of life.

When we seek Jesus’ intervention, we don’t need to fret about the difficulty associated with our request. That’s not an issue with him. He may not respond as we prefer because his agenda factors in realities we do not see at the moment. But Christ’s response will never be hampered by the “difficulty” of our request. May he grant us the grace to pray with a growing confidence in his power to bring about whatever he chooses.