No shortage in God’s “supply chain”

In many places in the world today, businesses are said to be running low on all kinds of goods and services. “You name it, and we have a shortage on it,” is how the CEO of one large United States manufacturer describes it (Brendan Murray, Enda Curran, Kim Chipman, “The World Economy is Suddenly Running Low on Everything,” www.bloomberg.com, May 17, 2021). He added that customers are trying to get everything they can now because they expect the shortages to extend into next year.

Rather than stockpiling raw materials and finished products, though, we can choose a very different, inexhaustible resource to double down on. And that’s prayer. Not a prayer that asks for things, but a spiritual understanding that challenges notions of limitation, including the notion that we’re sliding inevitably toward acute imbalance between supply and demand in the wake of the pandemic and that it will take time to replenish and recover.

Biblical accounts provide proofs that prayer can make a powerful, immediate difference—and my own experience has shown me this, too. One example of supply meeting demand a number of years ago was when our family unexpectedly had to move out of our home at a point when there was a critical shortage of affordable housing in our area. We were also in a financial position that appeared to restrict our options. But as we began our home search with prayer, we saw it was less about finding a house than about learning where our true security and supply lay—that it was fully established in God’s, divine Love’s, enduring care.