prayer – Page 2

A question of prayer

April 21, 2014 by Billy Coffey 5 Comments

Working at a college has its advantages. Having access to such a big group of smart people comes in handy for me in my daily life, especially when it comes to some of the larger problems I run across. In the five years I’ve been there, I have spoken with English professors about writing, political science professors about the goings-on in the world, and religion and philosophy professors about, well, religion and philosophy.

I would call none of our conversations a sharing of ideas. Their words and the diplomas that hang on their office walls are proof enough they are much more intelligent than little ol’ me. I’m good with that. There are advantages to being the dumb person in the room.

So the other day when my mind asked a question my heart had trouble answering, I went knocking on some office doors.

The first chair I sat in was in front of four bookcases that stretched floor to ceiling and were stuffed with titles I could barely pronounce. The professor—smart fella, with a Ph.D. in philosophy courtesy of an Ivy League school—looked at me with kind eyes and asked what was on my mind.

“What’s the point of praying for anything?” I asked him. “I mean, if God knows everything and has a perfect plan, then won’t His plan work out regardless of what I tell Him?”

The professor took off his glasses, rubbed the lenses with a handkerchief. Then he put the glasses back on and looked at the bookshelves behind me, looking for an answer.

“Let’s see,” he told me. He rose from the chair by the desk and brought down one book—this one old, with a worn leather cover and yellowed pages—and then another, this one so new the spine cracked as he opened it.

He talked for ten minutes about free will and time being an unfinished sentence. Or something. My nods at first were of the understanding kind. The ones toward the end were because I was fighting sleep.

I still don’t know what he said.

The door down the hall belonged to a religion professor (Ph.D. again, Ivy League again). I sat in a different chair in front of different books and asked the same question with the same results. More free will, plus something about alternate histories and God “delighting in Himself.”

It wasn’t the first time I’d walked into a professor’s office with one question and walked out with a dozen.

To make matters worse, my mind was still asking that question and my heart was still having trouble answering it.

What’s the point of praying for anything? Because it seems a little presumptuous to ask for anything from a God who already knows what I need (and what I don’t).

I was at a standstill over all of this until I talked to Ralph at the Dairy Queen last night. Ralph doesn’t have a Ph.D., and the only Ivy he knows is the kind that grows on the side of his house. And though far from an expert on matters of the spirit, he does preach part-time at one of the local churches when the regular preacher is sick or on vacation. And since he waved at me and was eating his cheeseburger all alone, I figured what the heck. I’d ask him:

“What’s the point of praying for anything?”

Ralph paused mid-chew. Cocked his head a little to the side. Said, “What kinda stupid question is that?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Just popped into my head the other day. But seriously, why ask Him for anything. And really, why pray at all? If God already knows what’s in my heart, why do I have to speak it?”

Ralph finished his bite, swallowed, then said, “B’cause it ain’t about you, son.”

“It’s not?”

He drawled out a slow “No” that sounded more like Nooo. “Boy, prayin’ ain’t about askin’. Ain’t even about praisin’, really. Nope, prayin’s about you gettin’ in line with God. It’s not about Him gettin’ in your head and heart, it’s about you gettin’ in His.”

Ah.

I left Ralph to his cheeseburger, answers in hand. And honestly, that answer made sense. Because life—better life, anyway—is always about Him more than about us.

And I left with other wisdom, too. The next time I have a question, I think I’ll spend less time in a professor’s office and more time down at the Dairy Queen.

ANSWERS

February 10, 2014 by Billy Coffey 1 Comment

To a certain extent, ritual plays a part in every life. We all adhere to our own ceremonies to mark the important occasions that come along. It can be something as extravagant as a neighbor of mine plans every Thanksgiving, when his home becomes a meeting place for family scattered to all corners of the country. Or it can be as small as the shot of whiskey a friend of mine takes at 4:12 in the afternoon each July 27, in remembrance of his father’s passing.

My own ritual—smaller than either of those I mentioned, yet to me no less significant—revolves around cleaning out my desk before the start of every novel. It is no mammoth undertaking, usually requiring no more than an hour’s time and involving no more than shelving books and filing papers. But I like to start fresh with each story I write, and nothing says fresh more than an empty slab of oak upon which to write.

As I cleaned and filed and shelved this morning, I came upon a tattered manila envelope at the bottom of a stack of papers. ANSWERS had been written diagonally across the front in red permanent ink, in a hand I can scarcely recognize now. The inside bulged with notes and scraps; newspaper clippings; magazine articles; letters written to me and copies of letters I’d written to others. Some were dated as recent as last year. The oldest had 4 Oct. 89 scrawled along the top.

I spread them out before me, reading each one until I remembered, trying to place the where and why of myself—what it had been that led me to include those stories there, in my envelope. I am not to the point that I can say I have lived many years upon this earth, have accumulated many things along the way, and yet I have always counted that envelope among my most important possessions. Because, what you see, what rests in there are all the questions I wish to ask God when I am able to see Him face to face. They are the things I wish to know.

I will stop short of calling that envelope EVIDENCE FOR PROSECUTION, though I admit it was very nearly labeled that instead of ANSWERS. And whom was I determined to prosecute, way back in the very dawn of my adulthood? God, of course. And for the single reason that I did not approve of the way He did things.

Laugh at that all you will. Take a look inside my envelope, though. You may change your mind.

You’ll see an obituary for a high school classmate of mine, who was killed in a freak accident not two years after our graduation—a bright, funny, loving boy, full of life until he wasn’t.

You’ll find a story of a missionary tortured and killed.

A small girl who wandered from home and became lost in the woods, never to be found.

A single mother of three, dying of inoperable cancer.

Accounts of oppression, disease, and injustice. Diary entries of heartbreak and doubt. Themes of death and evil. Tales that over the years forced me to wonder what you or anyone else have wondered at one time or another—

How can a good and loving God allow such things?

At a certain point, I understood there would be no answers to that question on this side of life. People have been questioning the origins of evil and it’s place with God for thousands of years, and we are not too far down the road to answering it. So I’ve kept all my questions here, in this envelope.

How exactly I would get that file to heaven with me was something I never quite figured out. In the past few years, I’ve devoted less and less time to pondering that problem. Not because evil no longer bothers me—it does, perhaps more now than ever—but because of the very likely possibility that I won’t care much about my questions in heaven. I’ll be too full of joy. I’ll be too busy spending time with all those who passed on before me, and preparing for those yet to arrive.

I still don’t understand a great many things in life. I suppose I always won’t. I don’t know why there must be cancer, and why that cancer must take so many innocent people. I don’t know why there is evil, or why there seems to be so much more of it than good.

I don’t know why God does the things He does, or allows what He allows.

But I can do one thing. I can approach those questions now as though they were parts of a story, one I would write just as God writes His own upon all of creation. And I would say—not as a pastor or theologian or philosopher, but as a storyteller—that it is far more beautiful a thing to be redeemed than be innocent. It is far more amazing for fight for peace in a fallen world than to maintain peace in a perfect one.

And it is far more noble to spend your life in search of something than have nothing to search for at all.

Christmas wishes

December 6, 2013 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

Screen Shot 2013-12-06 at 6.36.07 AM A few days ago, the local newspaper dedicated a few of their pages to children’s letters to Santa. It’s been a tradition with the News-Leader ever since I can remember, and I applaud them for it. Not only are the letters informative and at times very touching, they also bring back a little nostalgia. I was six when my letter to Santa appeared in the newspaper. I knew then I wanted to be a writer when I grew up.

If you look at these letters every year, and I do, you realize some things. First, toys have changed over the years. Footballs and baseball gloves have been replaced by i-Pods and Playstations. Things are a lot more electronic now. Still, there are presents that defy time and reach across generations. I was happy to see that both doll babies and Legos were still in high demand.

But though the toys have changed, the children haven’t. Say what you want about test scores being lower than they were twenty years ago or kids being more lethargic than they once were. Kids are still kids, and always will be. This is a good thing.

And you realize this, too: these letters to Santa could well be prayers to God. They are full of longings and wishes, pleas and hope, all directed to someone they know can help them. And the sorts of things these kids ask for aren’t really all that different than mine.

Things like faith in the midst of doubt. Take Jackson, for instance:

“Are you real, Santa? Or are you a phony? People say you are, some say not. I don’t know if you are, but when I’m older I’m going to find out…I hope your real that’s my belief…But one thing I want to do, to make proof that Santa’s real. So I can keep my belief.”

I’m right there with you, Jackson. “I believe, help my unbelief,” said the man to Jesus. And so say we all.

There is also the nagging sense that I’m not measuring up. “I hope you think I have been good this year,” says Sarah. A sentiment echoed by a lot of other kids in a lot of other letters. Some are more honest: “Sometimes I’m good, but sometimes I’m bad,” wrote Kevin. Aren’t we all? Which is the point, I think. We’re not good enough to deserve all the things we ask, and yet there they are, under the tree every year. Why? Because Santa knows even though we’re not so good sometimes, we’re still worth much. To kids, this sort of thing is called love. To adults, it’s called grace.

Of course, prayers are not all about me. There are plenty of other people who need help, too. They range from the small (“I wish you can help my mom get the tree out of the attic,” writes Megan) to the big (“All I want is my six teeth and my papa to feel better. I want my Meme to get to Maryland fine, and my family together for the holidays”–Jasmine).

And then there are the prayers that are said out of pain (“My daddy back. My daddy leave and we lonely have mommy, me and my dog”–Brittney).

There are also the ones said out of pure love (“I know this is going to be a bad Christmas for some kids. so I want you to give my presents to the kids who won’t be getting anything this year. God bless everyone!”–ZayVon).

I’m not sure if all those letters were answered the way the kids wanted them. That’s okay. Not all of our prayers get answered that way, either. But even if they weren’t, I feel pretty confident that all those kids will be writing letters again next year. Santa always come through in the end.

God, too.

What to pray for

November 5, 2013 by Billy Coffey 1 Comment

An important part of my nighttime routine is making a final pass through the house. I make sure the doors are locked and the outside light is on. Make sure the morning coffee is ready—it’s the smell of coffee and not the sound of the alarm that gets me out of bed—and the lights above the sink are shining—just in case someone wakes in the middle of the night thirsty. I’ll check to make sure my son is adequately covered and hasn’t flopped and flipped his blankets off. My final stop is to check my daughter’s sugar, because she may sleep and we all may sleep, but diabetes never does.

I always pray over my children then. Every night, without fail. They don’t know this; I’ve never told them. I suppose doing so is as much for my benefit as theirs. I have an uneasy relationship with the night. It’s the time of day when I often get most of my work done, and yet I spend much of that time peering into the shadows for what isn’t there.

My prayers are the usual ones—help us to sleep well, bless our family, let Your angels stand guard. And keep us safe, always that. Always a lot of that.

I heard a preacher the other day talk about praying for safety. He said Christians shouldn’t place so much of a premium on that, that this is pretty much one of the safest countries in the world and so we’re pretty much wasting our words, that we should instead pray for boldness because that’s what we need more. He said we’re often content to remain where we are because that’s where everything is safe and familiar, when God wants us to go forth and conquer new lands within and without.

I’ll admit he stepped on my toes a little with that. It’s probably true that I need more boldness than safety, just as true about those new lands. And I’ll say that fear plays an important part in my life and maybe too much, what with all those shadows and whatnot.

So maybe instead of praying that God will keep us safe, I should pray that He will keep us on our toes. And rather than asking that His angels stand guard over us, I should pray that they will charge ahead of us into new places and new ways of seeing things. Maybe I’ve been tricked into thinking that my life is better thought of as something to be endured rather than made better, as if my purpose in being here is to comfort myself before I comfort others.

Maybe.

But maybe praying for safety is important, too. It reminds me that despite what everyone in my family may believe, I’m small. Just a tiny speck in a big world, one that oftentimes is much more scary than it is beautiful. And one who often needs a great deal of help.

Perhaps if I had the faith of the preacher I heard the other day, I wouldn’t need to ask for so much safety. Perhaps if I had his view of the world, I would see no reason to fear anything. I would see the battle as already won and the last sentence already written, one with an exclamation point rather than a period.

I hope to have that sort of faith one day. For now, I don’t. For now, I look at this world and see more shadows than light and more of what could go wrong than what has already gone right.

Knowing how to pray

July 22, 2013 by Billy Coffey 5 Comments

A friend recently confessed that not only had he never prayed, he had never found an adequate opportunity to do so. Why bother, he asked, to resort to empty words to a God who is at best noncommittal and at worst uncaring?

I gave him an appreciative nod. There had been times in my life when I suspected God to be both, but in the end the opposite had always held to be true. But his words struck me. Prayer was much a part of my life even in my darkest days. Not praying, no matter how far the distance between myself and God, was never an option.

I’d always assumed there were many in the world who never lifted their voice to heaven. I’d just never known one.

I figured I prayed about seven times a day. Not bad, really, until I started thinking about some of the things I prayed both for and about. Asking for God to watch over my loved ones is a lot different than asking Him to let the Yanks win and the Sox lose. I asked for both over the weekend.

And while asking Him to make my headache go away is maybe an okay thing, asking Him to give the person who caused my headache sudden and uncontrollable diarrhea probably wasn’t.

It all got me thinking not only about how and when I pray, but how and when others do the same. Prayer is something many of us take for granted. I doubt we pause enough to consider the gravity of actually speaking to the Creator of the universe.

Prayer is serious stuff. Fascinating, too. Nothing says more about us than how we talk to God. So I decided to take last Sunday and observe both family and friends in a sort of super secret prayer survey. I wanted to know who got it just right, who didn’t quite, and why.

Church seemed like a logical starting point. Lots of people pray in church. I listened to the Sunday School teacher, the pastor, and an usher pray with both an eloquence and spirit that I could aspire to but never quite accomplish. Eloquence has never been my strong suit. Me often don’t talk like that pretty.

Lunch with my wife’s family, however, seemed more promising. There are a lot of things country folk can do better than others, and talking to God is among them. Country prayers are not as flowery as church prayers. There are plenty of ain’ts and gonnas. It’s not praying, it’s prayin’. Big difference.

So we prayed for the hands that cooked the food and the ground that grew it. For the rain that would make the corn grow and the closeness of family. That prayer was nice. Homey. But it still wasn’t quite…right. Something was missing.

Bedtime found my family gathered around my daughter’s bed, knees to floor. And though I normally assume the traditional pose of head bowed and hands folded, I cheated that night. I kept my eyes and ears open as my children prayed. Together.

“Thanks, Jesus,” my son said, “for all the cool stuff You showed me today.”

“And,” said my daughter, “for the green grass. It’s my favorite color.”

“Thanks for the macaroni, because I love macaroni,” added my son.

“I didn’t like the broccoli,” my daughter said. “Can you please do something about that?”

“You made pretty clouds tonight.”

“I love you, God.”

“I love you too, God.”

“We both love you.”

Then, together: “Amen.”

I walked outside a while later to make sure the stars were still there and say goodnight to God. I’ve always liked praying outside. For some strange reason, I’ve always thought my words could go through a ceiling of clouds much easier than a ceiling of plaster.

I’ll be honest. Prayer has always been a little confusing to me. Like the people at church, I’ve tried to be eloquent and flowery. Like the people I shared lunch with, I’ve tried to be folksy and homey. And like my children, I’ve tried to keep things simple.

It isn’t always easy to put thoughts and feelings to words, no matter to whom we’re talking.

I guess in the end it isn’t so much what we say to God as it is the heart with which it’s said. What we can’t explain, He knows. What we can’t say quite right He knows exactly.

And sometimes, many times, a prayer needs no words at all.

Which is why that night, there beneath the stars, I simply looked to heaven and smiled.

Prayer adjustments

June 26, 2013 by Billy Coffey 2 Comments

It was a big deal for my daughter and me, a couple Saturday’s ago. We’d been skittish for most of that day. She battled nerves over participating in her first official piano recital. I battled my apprehensions because that recital was to take place at the local nursing home.

One small story first:

I was in kindergarten when my teacher decided it would be a grand idea for the class to make Valentine’s Day cards for the elderly. We plunged into the task with all the gusto five-year-olds can summon, after which we were herded onto a school bus and trucked down to what my teacher called “The Rest Home.” The name conjured all manner of fantastical images in my mind, all of which were proven false once I walked through those old wooden doors. The nurses had gathered everyone in a gathering room that was much less stately and much more moldering, where I was greeted immediately by an old man with hooks for hands (and no, I’m not kidding). The sight froze me such that the other people in class quickly distributed their cards to the nearest person and made a quick exit, leaving me all alone. I heard a murmur to my left and turned there, seeing a hand stretched out. I shoved my card into a set of bony fingers and looked up just long enough to see the woman to which I’d just wished a happy Valentine’s Day didn’t have a right eye, only a patch of red, seeping skin. For months, I prayed at night for God to never let me end up like that woman. The memory haunts me to this day. It’s proof that much of the weight we carry in our hearts has been there in some form for a very long while.

That’s what was in my mind during most of that Saturday. Sitting there on the sofa, listening to my daughter practice.

It’s also why I kept near the doors when we arrived that afternoon. Go ahead and judge me, I don’t care.

The gathering room stood empty but for the twenty or so chairs that had been laid out in neat rows. The concertgoers trickled in after—men and women dressed in khakis and dresses, combed and perfumed and bejeweled.

And you know what? It wasn’t bad, not really. They were smiling and talking and happy. They were, as far as I could tell, nothing more than a collection of friendly grandparents.

That all changed when a nurse pushed in the woman in the wheel chair.

Her hair was thin and the color of snow, arranged in a what reminded me of an abandoned bird’s nest. Beneath her white slacks and blue shirt laid the remains of what I imagined to be a vibrant and healthy body once upon a time, but was now little more than a thin layer of dried, leathery skin over frail bones. And right there by the doors, I prayed that I would never end up like that woman.

The nurse wheeled her into the first row as the recital began. One student after another, fingers dancing and sometimes tripping over the keys. The room became filled with applause. Only the woman in the wheelchair did not move. Her head lolled from side to side. I supposed that was the closest she could come now to clapping, and I prayed I would never end up like her again.

My daughter did well. Magnificent, in fact, though I am perhaps a bit biased. But I don’t want to talk about the songs she played or how straight she sat or how she really nailed the ending to the Flintstones theme song. To be honest, I barely noticed any of that. I was too busy watching the woman in the wheelchair.

It was in the middle of my daughter’s second song when I looked at the woman again, and only then because of the thin stream of drool leaking from her mouth. But before I could turn away, I noticed her fingers moving along her chest, playing the keys in her mind. She kept perfect time with my daughter’s song, even caught the parts my daughter missed.

And I realized then that she may have been confined to both a wheelchair and a fading life, but she was still hearing music. She was still playing her song, even in the wan of her life. And can any of us truly strive for more in this life? Could our prayers truly ask for nothing else?

Me, I don’t think so. I think that lovely old lady is better off than a lot of us. Which was why that night and every night since, I’ve asked God to let me end up like her.