Infinite Omnipotence?

There are a few things that stand out clearly from my teenage years. They're fresh in my mind, as if they happened yesterday. One of them is a dialogue between my aunt and my uncle. I was the silent observer...the camera, so to speak. My aunt wished out loud that Allah would help Pakistan win a cricket match. My uncle, playing the role of the wise, open-minded male of the house, laughed and said, "You can't expect Allah to have the time to attend to such small matters."

We often tend to paint the unseen in the light of man and what surrounds him. It's a natural and often inadvertent response...we relate better to what we've already experienced and observed. If we'd seen angels, jinnaat, and other supernatural beings, they would hardly been "the unseen" anymore, would they? That's why man has resorted again and again to idolatory. Hinduism claim that their statues are actually just agents - proxies, if you will - between believers and a single God. It's just easier to relate to something tangible. A few years ago, when I prayed, I unconsciously thought I was prostrating before a tall, kindly-looking man who glowed blue and wore a robe. Then I realized I was doing this, and stopped. Again, all human nature. That's what my uncle was thinking when he said Allah would not have the time to deal with small things. After all, He is running the universe and all the worlds beyond!

But now, I disagree with my uncle. As time has passed, I've tried to decouple the inadvertent biases in my own thinking from my perception of Allah. Allah is perfect. If I believe in that, then I cannot say anything that bounds Allah in anyway. To some extent, I cannot even say He is unbounded, for even in making that statement, I am binding Him. And of course, I cannot state that he doesn't have time for "small" things, because I am implying that his ability to multitask is finite. It's finite only if He wills it to be!

Again, it's interesting how human nature categorizes everything in terms of size. A colony of ants is less important than a herd of elephants. The celestial bodies have enchanted mankind for so long. They've been made into gods, and so on. Even within humans, height is considered a positive attribute, especially for leadership roles. But the honest truth is that I cannot impose those innate biases on Allah. I should not think that Allah deems things important based on size, or whatever ideals I have. How do I know what the relative importance of an amoeba is to Allah, compared to, say, a giraffe?

After all, in the grand scheme of things, we're all just specks of dust, floating in the vastness of the cosmos.