There are, then, these alternatives. If you do not like to take the one,
you are sure to have to take the other. There is only one way out of the
wood, and it is this which Paul expands in these last words of my text.
If a man does not pray about everything, he will be worried about most
things. If he does pray about everything, he will not be troubled beyond
what is good for him, about anything. So there are these alternatives;
and we have to make up our minds which of the two we are going to take.
The heart is never empty. If not full of God, it will be full of the
world, and of worldly care. Luther says somewhere that a man's heart is
like a couple of millstones; if you don't put something between them to
grind, they will grind each other. It is because God is not in our
hearts that the two stones rub the surface off one another. So the
victorious antagonist of anxiety is trust, and the only way to turn
gnawing care out of my heart and life is to usher God into it, and to
keep him resolutely in it.

'In everything.' If a thing is great enough to threaten to make me
anxious, it is great enough for me to talk to God about. If He and I are
on a friendly footing, the instinct of friendship will make me speak. If
so, how irrelevant and superficial seem to be discussions whether we
ought to pray about worldly things, or confine our prayers entirely to
spiritual and religious matters. Why! if God and I are on terms of
friendship and intimacy of communication, there will be no question as
to what I am to talk about to Him; I shall not be able to keep silent as
to anything that interests me. And we are not right with God unless we
have come to the point that entire openness of speech marks our
communications with Him, and that, as naturally as men, when they come
home from business, like to tell their wives and children what has
happened to them since they left home in the morning, so naturally we
talk to our Friend about everything that concerns us. 'In _everything_
let your requests be made known unto God.' That is the wise course,
because a multitude of little pimples may be quite as painful and
dangerous as a large ulcer. A cloud of gnats may put as much poison into
a man with their many stings as will a snake with its one bite. And if
we are not to get help from God by telling Him about little things,
there will be very little of our lives that we shall tell Him about at
all. For life is a mountain made up of minute flake