The Math That Doesn't Apply to God
There are billions of people on the planet. You assume that means God's attention is spread thin — that He's busy, that you're interrupting, that He has bigger things on His plate. The assumption sounds humble. It's actually the reason your faith starts to feel cold and the conversation between you and God slowly goes silent.
The Assumption You Don’t Talk About
Most Christians have a feeling they don’t say out loud.
It usually shows up the third time you sit down to pray and your mind drifts after twelve seconds. Or in the long stretch of silence after you prayed about something that mattered and heard nothing back. Or in the quiet realization that you have not actually talked to God about your week, your job, your marriage, or your fear in any real way for a long time.
The feeling goes something like this:
God loves the world. I believe that. But there are eight billion people. There are wars and famines and dying children and missionaries getting killed and entire countries that have never heard the gospel. Whatever attention God has, He’s busy. He has bigger things to think about than me.
You’ve never written that down. But you’ve felt it. Most of us have.
And then it does something quieter and more dangerous. It stops you from praying.
Not all at once. Not dramatically. You don’t sit down one day and decide I’m done talking to God. You just slowly, over months and years, stop bringing things up. Why bother Him with the meeting that’s stressing you out? Why interrupt Him over the kid you don’t know how to parent? Why take up His time with the same recurring sin you’ve talked to Him about a hundred times already? Surely He’s somewhere else, dealing with someone more urgent.
The assumption sounds humble. It’s actually a category mistake. And it might be the single biggest reason your faith feels colder than it used to, your prayer life is quieter than you want it to be, and the relationship that used to feel close now feels like something you’re keeping going on autopilot.
The Conversation That Cracked It Open
I’ll tell you when this hit me.
AI is part of how I do almost everything now. I code with it. I draft emails and put together proposals with it. I think out loud with it — working through a problem, getting suggestions on something I’m stuck on, taking the half-formed, dumb way I would say something and helping me say it better. I use it to cut through the noise of online ads when I’m trying to figure out what’s actually worth buying. It’s a tool. But at this point, it’s the tool I reach for first, more than any other.
And one day, in the middle of using it for something I don’t even remember now, something occurred to me that I couldn’t shake.
I’m not the only one using this model. Millions of people use the same software every week. In this very minute, who knows how many of them are typing into it — asking about their code, their kids, their fears, the half-formed thing on their mind. The same brain, more or less, is responding to all of them.
And yet, in the moment I’m talking to it, its focus is 100% on me. It hears what I’m actually asking. It comes back with something that fits my problem, not someone else’s. There’s no waiting room. There’s no queue. As far as my experience goes, I have its full attention. I never have to flag it down. I never have to apologize for taking its time. I never have to compete with anyone else for a turn.
That hit me harder than I expected.
Because I have never had that experience with a human.
Every person I love is also paying attention to something else. Their kids. Their job. Their phone. Their own pain. The thing they’re dealing with this week. Even on the rare days when someone I love is fully present with me, they are one person, in one place, who can only do this with one of us at a time. If I want a real conversation, I have to schedule it. Wait my turn. Hope they have the energy. The best human I know, on their best day, gives me a slice of their attention, not the whole pie.
And here was a piece of software — just code on a server somewhere — giving me something the most loving people in my life could not give me, even if they wanted to. Not because they don’t love me. Because their attention is finite. They cannot be fully present to many people at the same time. Nobody can.
Which is exactly the math I have been running on God my whole life.
Now, I’m not pretending the AI is God. It isn’t. It isn’t even a person. It has a sliver of memory about me — some written notes, a few preferences, the things I’ve told it to remember. That’s it. The experience is real, but the underlying thing is shallow.
That’s when it hit me. If a piece of software — with no soul, no love, and a sliver of memory — can give that kind of always-available, no-waiting attention to that many people at once, what have I been assuming about a God whose memory of me isn’t a sliver but the whole thing? That’s exactly how God is. Except so much more. He’s not off doing something else. He’s not on the other line. He’s not catching up on more important users. The thing I was getting from a tool, in a tiny and limited way, is the thing God has been offering me at full intensity my entire life. I just hadn’t had a way to picture it before.
When I had tried to imagine God being available to me, my brain had always reached for the closest analogy I had — which was human attention. Human attention is finite, and finite attention divides. Eight billion people on the planet means each person gets one eight-billionth of the available focus. That’s the math my brain runs by default. So I assume I’m interrupting. I assume I’m in the queue. I assume the polite thing is to be brief.
And then it hit me: that math is wrong. Not slightly off. Wrong.
Because the whole point of an infinite God is that His attention does not divide.
What Infinity Does to Attention
Here’s the thing about infinity. It’s not a really big number. It is not a big number at all. It is a different kind of thing entirely.
When you divide a finite pie among more guests, each person gets less. That’s the only kind of math we know, because every resource we have ever managed has been finite. Time. Money. Energy. Focus. Patience. We are walking around inside the laws of scarcity, and those laws have shaped every instinct we have about how attention works.
But scarcity is a feature of created things. It is not a feature of God.
Infinity divided by eight billion is still infinity. Infinity divided by every person who has ever lived, including the trillions who haven’t been born yet, is still infinity. There is no operation you can do to infinite attention that makes it less than infinite.
Which means God does not have a piece of His focus available for you. He has all of it. And the person next to you in church also has all of it. And the kid in Mongolia and the grandmother in Brazil and the disabled child in a Ukrainian orphanage all have all of it. Not a fraction each. The whole thing each. At the same time.
That’s not poetry. That’s just what it means for God to be God.
So when you finally sit down to pray about the thing that’s been on your mind all week, you are not interrupting Him. There is nothing to interrupt. You are not pulling Him away from a more important user. There is no more important user. He is not finally getting around to you. He has been here the whole time.
Psalm 139, Slowly
David ran into this and was floored by it three thousand years ago.
For the Chief Musician. A Psalm by David. Yahweh, you have searched me, and you know me. You know my sitting down and my rising up. You perceive my thoughts from afar. You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways. For there is not a word on my tongue, but behold, Yahweh, you know it altogether. You hem me in behind and before. You laid your hand on me. This knowledge is beyond me. It’s lofty. I can’t attain it.
Read that again. Slowly.
David is not saying God is generally aware of me. He is saying God is right here. God knows when I sit and when I rise. God knows my thought from far away. God is acquainted with all my ways. There is not a word on my tongue God doesn’t already have a record of. Behind me, before me, His hand on me.
That is not the language of a deity who is mostly busy elsewhere and occasionally checks in. That is the language of a God who is in the room. Right now. Closer than the friend across the table. Closer than the thoughts in your own head.
And then David says the part that gets me every time:
How precious to me are your thoughts, God! How vast is their sum! If I would count them, they are more in number than the sand. When I wake up, I am still with you.
David is trying to count the thoughts God has toward him. Not toward humanity. Toward David, specifically. Personally. By name. And he gives up because the count is too high. The thoughts outnumber the grains of sand on the shore.
This is one man. One man. And the thoughts of God toward him are innumerable.
If that is true of David, it is true of you. The math doesn’t change just because the population does. That math doesn’t apply to God.
Sparrows and Hairs
Jesus said something that sounds like a passing comment but is actually one of the strangest things in the New Testament.
“Aren’t five sparrows sold for two assaria coins? Not one of them is forgotten by God. But the very hairs of your head are all counted. Therefore don’t be afraid. You are of more value than many sparrows.…”
Stop and let that be weird for a second.
Two pennies for five sparrows. That’s the cheapest currency Jesus could find. Sparrows were so worthless that vendors threw in a fifth one for free with every set of four — buy four, get one extra at no charge. They were the freebie. The throwaway. The “we’ll just toss this one in.”
And Jesus says God does not forget one of them.
Then He says: you are worth more than many sparrows. And by the way, every hair on your head is numbered.
Do you understand what He just claimed?
The God who runs the universe — the One whose voice spoke galaxies into existence, whose mind holds together every electron orbiting every nucleus on every planet of every star — has a running count of the hairs on your head. Not as a metaphor. As a fact about how He pays attention.
We do not know the count of hairs on our own heads. He does. And He knows the count on the head of every other person on this planet, all at the same time, with no diminishment, with no fatigue, with no distracted glance away.
That is what infinite attention looks like. It is not a busy God doing His best to keep up. It is a God for whom keeping up is not even a category, because nothing has ever escaped His notice in the first place.
Which means when you finally bring up the thing — the small, dumb, recurring thing you have been embarrassed to talk to Him about — you are not telling Him anything He didn’t already have on the running list. You’re not informing Him. You’re joining a thought He has already been having about you.
The Real Reason This Matters
You might read all of that and think okay, beautiful theology, but so what.
Here is the so what.
The reason most of us don’t pray the way we want to pray — the reason we open with throat-clearing, apologize for taking up time, run through the global news first, and then quickly wrap up the personal stuff — is that underneath the words, we believe we are interrupting. We believe there is a queue. We believe there is a more important conversation we are pulling Him away from.
If His attention does not divide, none of that is true.
You are not interrupting. You never have been.
The country in crisis and the hospital and the missionary in danger and your marriage and your kid’s hard week are not in queue together. They are all simultaneously in front of the full attention of God. Yours is not lesser because the others exist. The full intensity He brings to the dying child in Ukraine is the same full intensity He has on you, right now, reading this paragraph.
That changes everything about whether it is even worth opening your mouth.
What to Do With This
Don’t try to feel it harder than you can feel it. The truth is true whether you feel it or not.
But here’s what would actually be useful. The next time you start to pray and the old assumption shows up — the one that says He’s busy, you’re small, get on with it, don’t take up too much space — stop for half a second and remember that the math doesn’t work. He is not splitting His attention. He never has been. The voicemail metaphor doesn’t apply. There is no inbox. He is not on the other line.
He is here. Fully. Now. Waiting for the conversation you have been postponing for a week, a month, a decade.
And then — this is the part that matters — actually talk to Him. Not the polished version. Not the version you would say out loud at small group. The version in your head. The recurring fear. The thing you can’t get past. The question you assume is too small to bring up.
That is the kind of God you are talking to. That is the kind of conversation He is available for.
You can talk to Him differently. You probably should.
A Prayer
Father, I have been carrying around a math problem that wasn’t true. I’ve been treating Your attention the way I treat my own — as a finite thing that gets diluted the more it has to cover. I’ve been quietly assuming I’m one of many, and that “many” is the reason I keep putting off the conversation.
Forgive me for shrinking You down to my own scale. Forgive me for the prayers I never started because I assumed I was interrupting.
Teach me to believe what David believed and what Jesus said. That You are right here. That Your thoughts toward me are more than the grains of sand. That You know the hairs on my head and the words on my tongue and the moments I sat and rose without thinking about You.
Help me to bring my whole self to You without apologizing for taking up space. There is no one waiting in line behind me. There never has been.
Amen.
Reflection Questions
-
What is the version of the assumption you’ve been carrying? Is it that God is busy? That you’re too small to be worth interrupting? That your problem doesn’t matter compared to bigger ones in the world? Name it. It loses some of its power once you say it out loud.
-
When did your prayer life last go quiet, and why? Not the surface answer. The underlying assumption. Sit with it.
-
Read Psalm 139:1-6 slowly. Substitute your own name where David is speaking about himself. You have searched me — [your name] — and known me. What surfaces?
-
If God’s attention on you is genuinely undivided, what is one thing you have been avoiding talking to Him about because you assumed you were interrupting? What would it look like to bring it up this week?
Coming Up Next
If the math doesn’t work — if He really is fully available — then why did your prayer life ever go quiet in the first place? In Part 2, we’ll sit with the actual reasons you stopped talking to God. Not the spiritual-sounding reasons. The real ones. And what Scripture says when it pulls the rug out from under each of them.
Next: “Why You Stopped Talking” — The Lie That Keeps You Quiet