Have you ever wondered how God answers so many prayers when the conditions required to do that seem to be totally incompatible? For example, I have heard accounts on more than one occasion, from reliable witnesses, of answers to prayer about the weather. Normally it has been along the lines of, "The weather forecast was solid rain all day and we seriously needed some dry weather in the middle of the afternoon, so we prayed and there was no rain from one o'clock until three - just when we needed it. The next day we bumped into some friends in the shop who remarked how the rain had been unrelenting all day - just what was needed because the ground had been too dry for the crops. They live in the next village, just a mile away, but it seems that only we had the dry spell." On a showery day the clouds drop their water only in certain places, but sometimes God arranges holes in the rain when there is otherwise no respite from one horizon to the other. In a case such as this, that provided the answers to the prayers of the farmers for rain and of the individual for a brief dry period.
Irene and I have observed the opposite as well. We were visiting somewhere on what started out as a clear day and a weather front passed over. Along the line of the front there was what appeared to be a pillar of cloud just at one place. Clearly it was raining there and nowhere else in the area. I had had a dream of a postcode, which turned out to be in the same district and when we plotted the direction of the cloud pillar on a map it coincided perfectly with the postcode. We now live in that exact place.
God works everything together for the good of those who love him. (Romans chapter 8, verse 28)
These are just one type of example of how God manages to make things work together to do what he wants in the world through natural processes, and at the same time answer conflicting prayer requests from a vast number of people. Does he do this by setting up the Universe in a way that will naturally do what is required in the future at the appropriate times? Does he instead steer the natural processes in some way, on a daily basis, without actually breaking the physical laws? Does he sometimes actually intervene to change what would happen naturally? We shall probably never know, because we experience much of this as normal life, rather than clearly miraculous signs and wonders. In fact, there is probably a bit of all three involved. This is, however, still God making everything happen the way that He wants. Let us not forget to thank God for answers to prayer that he provides quietly through nature.