I’ve just had a lesson from God in praying when I didn’t want to pray, when I had decided it was impossible so there was no point bothering as it was a done deal with no hope and because I didn’t want to bother because it wasn’t important enough. And I had to learn the lesson from God and a child.

We’ve recently got ourselves our first ever pets, two much loved chickens that are soft and fluffy, friendly and lay the tastiest eggs ever. They give us all hours of entertainment as they waddle around.

This week we lost them. It was my fault, I’d left the hatch open at the back and gone out for 3 hours in the evening to find them gone from the garden, escaped down the side alley and off into the main roads of London. They don’t stand a chance outside of their pen after dusk as the foxes and cats are after them, even when they are shut in their cage in daylight.

My eleven year old son was in floods of tears and I told him there was no hope, that it would take a miracle to even find them, let alone have them back in one piece. There is no way they would survive a night alone outside a cage with all the predators after them. And they are not very bright, they wander into all sorts of dangerous places.

I said I would call the police as a standard procedure to let them know, just in case someone phoned in. But very calmly my son said, ‘Wait. There’s something we must do first.’

‘What?’

‘We must pray.’

I didn’t want to do that. They were two £11 chickens and they were gone, dead by now probably and I didn’t want to engage God in something that was clearly impossible and also not hugely important, something that would be an effort to build faith for and may well be too much effort for the disappointment. But we prayed, well he prayed. Then he made me phone around to get prayer support from key people, which I felt embarrassed to do. Then I phoned the police.

The police officer’s response: ‘This is a prank call isn’t it? You’re telling me there are two chickens on the loose in London and I have to put a call out to all the patrol cars in the area to watch out for a black and ginger pair walking down by the shops?’ He struggled to contain his giggles. I could see the funny side.

We walked the streets for a bit, along with a few neighbours, all who like me felt that it was a lost cause and came home.

‘Now the only thing left to do,’ my still calm son said, ‘is go to bed and read the happy book and pray.’

Tired and not interested, but for my son and to honour his faith, I read him the bible and then we prayed again. But then I said he was to pray, not just me, and in tongues from now on, out loud with me, something he hasn’t been bothered to do ever since he first got the gift of tongues when praying in earnest for his father.

We prayed for about half an hour together and I got a word from God that I was to go out to look in the back gardens. It was 1.30am, it was dark, but I went out in obedience, but so dark I couldn’t see a thing and we decided to set the alarm to look again at first light.

But once I went back to bed I had another strong word from God, this time more direct and with a stern tone. It went something like this:

‘So you don’t believe that I can direct two little chickens back to their cage wherever they are when I directed animals of every species, from all places, two by two to Noah’s ark? And that’s why you don’t want to pray.’

I felt cut to the core and very small. Now I understood I had a duty to pray, however small an issue it was, however impossible it seemed. The issue was not the size of the task, or it’s likelihood of being answered, but my obedience to pray to my Father God for anything.

So I prayed, on and off, with a fever I had picked up already that day preventing me from sleeping and so leaving me unable to do much else but pray for these silly but sweet chickens. And this time I prayed with faith, knowing that God had done just this thing before with animals in the bible, and for God to bring them back totally unscathed. I didn’t want two mauled chickens half alive and traumatised.

At 4.20am as I tossed and turned unable to sleep with the fever I heard the distress call of my two chickens outside my bedroom window. I rushed out shouting, seeing something attacking them, which fled as I came out.

I grabbed the little chicken sitting there looking half doped, seemingly unscathed, relieved we had at least found one chicken.

I put her in the cage, ready to look for the other, but there she was already, tucked away in the nesting box!

So God did it. He directed both chickens back, unharmed, untouched and they laid two beautiful eggs for us in the morning.

I didn’t understand it. I was speechless, so were my neighbours.

My son had been rewarded and had some practical lessons from God.

For me this wasn’t the most important need in my life, but God wanted to teach me that prayer and faith go hand in hand with obedience. We’re not to judge what is impossible and then not pray, we’re not to judge what is important or not. Our job is just to trust God in all things, in whatever answer he brings, but to pray, believing it’s over to him, the God of all things possible.