Pass the Celery, Please

I can’t eat chocolate.

I know, I know. Perhaps admitting this sad truth isn’t the brightest way to begin the first post of my new blog. After all, I may have just lost most of you ladies, who have fallen senseless to the floor from the shock that this could actually be someone’s lot in life!

It’s not that I’m allergic to chocolate. Like any living, breathing woman, I scarfed down chocolate by the bucketful until early 2008. That’s when I came face to face with the abrupt realization that, along with sodium,  my caffeine consumption was intensifying the symptoms of my recently diagnosed inner ear disorder.

Nine months later, God provided a wonderful doctor and the right combination of medications to return my hearing and balance back to normal. But I knew, if I didn’t want to revert back to being a literal dizzy blonde, that meant not only staying on a perpetual low-sodium diet but giving up caffeinated coffee, tea, pop…

And chocolate.

As a woman who loves chocolate, that’s not easy. After all, chocolate is everywhere. In the check-out lines. On the Bible study snack table. In church on Mother’s Day. Smeared on my kid’s faces. On Valentine’s Day, I have to settle for a heart-shaped box of white chocolates—which I’m here to tell you isn’t chocolate at all.

At weddings, banquets, and fundraisers, often the dessert choices all contain chocolate. But when I find myself yielding to the temptation to grab a triple-chocolate torte, I pray for strength, march back to my table, and content myself with a piece of celery.

Although these chocolate moments can be the perfect opportunity to wallow in self-pity, I consider them precious reminders of God’s grace, providence, and attentive ear. You see, after God answered my prayers and I no longer suffered from dizziness, vertigo attacks, and hearing loss, I found myself still in the habit of talking to him about everything. And it confirmed something about our amazing heavenly Father.

No prayer is too small to lift up to him.

Like most people, I usually face pretty commonplace issues—I can’t find my phone, I’m running late, I picked up a virus, my computer picked up a virus. But I also know people who have cancer, fathers who have lost their jobs, children with challenges, couples facing divorce, families ravaged by alcohol abuse. And at times I wondered—am I bothering God when I pray about my everyday problems when there are so many more important prayer requests for him to handle?  Does he even care about my everyday problems?

I’ve heard that a lot, and that’s why I’m writing this blog.

How Does He Fit? Our Big God in Small Places showcases our everlasting, immeasurable Father who listens to every prayer—the prayers we consider God-sized, and the prayers we hesitate to lift up to him, because we think they might be too insignificant. It’s about being confident that our mighty God wants to be part of our everyday lives and our everyday struggles. If something is important to us, it’s important to him. No matter how small.

We’ll find out how God has revealed himself and his ways, through both urgent and ordinary requests.

And, because God has a sense of humor, I’ll post The Dizzy Blonde Chronicles every fourth Monday of the month so we can spend some time laughing.

I like the New Living Translation’s wording of Philippians 4:6—”Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything.”

Everything. Because, no matter how trivial, no matter how silly, no matter what other people think—if we care about it, God cares about it.

Yes, God is infinite, mighty, and powerful. He is, indeed, a big God. But we can be certain that, in all those small areas of our lives that are important to us, if we ask, he’ll be there.

In those small places, our big God will fit.