Billy Coffey

storyteller

Lesser prayers

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image courtesy of photobucket.com
image courtesy of photobucket.com

The prayer request portion of Sunday school class is the reason why we never seem to get much Sunday schooling done. And that’s not a knock against me or anyone else there. We have a fine class, a fine teacher, and a fine time probing the depths of the Good Book. Secretly, though, I suspect many of us spend most of that first half hour of class fidgeting and sighing so we can get to the good part. The part that, whether stated or not, means a little more.

A few Sundays ago the teacher wrapped up his lesson early, allowing those so inclined a full twenty minutes to spill their guts and tell everyone the happenings in the days of their lives.

“Prayer requests?” he asked.

Hands shot up. The teacher would call a name or nod to a person, going one by one through the room and taking notes, which would be distributed the next week on our official prayer request sheets.

Yes. We take this seriously.

Our space was then transformed from classroom to confessional as secret pains and worries were flung out into the light to be prodded and prayed over.

The lady two seats down from me was the first to raise her hand but not to be chosen. She lowered her hand and waited her turn. The one chosen began to speak on soft and muffled words of the tests she was to get in the coming week that would reveal whether she had cancer or not.

A couple near the front had just learned they were going to be parents. It was their fourth try, they said. The first three pregnancies had resulted in miscarriages.

One man was losing his job.

Another man was still looking for one.

One woman said her teenage son came home drunk two nights before and threatened her. She’d been staying with her sister since, afraid to go home.

A mother and father had a son who’d just been given his traveling orders for Afghanistan. “Pray he shoots straight and ducks,” the father said.

Another couple had a friend who’s son had just come home from Iraq. The funeral would be the next day.

A car accident had taken the life of a seventeen-year-old son of a preacher in the next town.

A woman buckled under the grief of a marriage in tatters.

And on. And on.

And through it all, the woman two seats down would raise her hand and wait her turn, lowering it when the Sunday school teacher had called upon someone else, scribbling both name and note on the paper.

After ten minutes, her hand went into the air slower and with a little more hesitation. After fifteen, her hand wasn’t raised at all.

I found her in the hallway afterward and said hello. Then I mentioned the lack of time and the abundance of prayer requests in class, and that it was a shame she never got to share hers.

“If you’d like,” I said, “you can tell me what it was. My family and I will pray.”

She looked at me and offered a small smile.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “I guess it’s not that important. I lost my necklace, you see. It’s just one of those cheap silver crosses that you can pick up at the Christian bookstore for about five dollars, but it meant the world to me. My son gave it to me for my birthday last year. Saved up his allowance for almost a whole month.” She paused and than added, “I just don’t know what I’m going to do if I don’t find it.”

I nodded.

“It seemed so important at the time,” she said. “But then came all those other things people needed praying for, cancer and war and death. So many are hurting now. My problems just didn’t seem that great after that.”

I nodded again. I understood, I really did. But she was wrong.

She was called away before I could tell her what I was thinking. What I thought she really needed to hear.

She’s right, of course. There are so many hurting now, and for so many reasons. But I for one believe that doesn’t mean one person’s problems are greater than another’s. Not to God.

To God, at that moment the only thing in the universe that mattered was that she had lost her necklace. Just like the only thing in the universe that mattered was one son going to war and another coming home, and a family dissolving, and a car accident, and a threatened mother.

Humility is an important thing to feel. We need to know the world doesn’t revolve around us.

But the love of God is an important thing to feel, too. And we also need to know that.

Waiting on a miracle

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image courtesy of photobucket.com
image courtesy of photobucket.com

She stands in the parking lot flashing the universal sign of hopeless surrender—arms crossed, head down, foot tapping. Beside her is what remains of her car, a once useful tool that is now dead on arrival. She’s figured out how to raise the hood and prop it up. Unfortunately, that seems to be the extent of her mechanical know-how.

So I walk over and say, “Afternoon, ma’am.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” she says. Then, as if to clarify, she points to the open maw of her sedan and says, “Stupid car.”

“Someone on the way?” I ask her.

“No. Can’t get hold of anyone.”

I nod. “Mind if I take a look?”

“Be my guest.”

I peek under the hood and check the usual suspects. Battery cables are good. Belts are fine. Plenty of coolant and oil.

“Will it turn over at all?” I ask.

“It acts like it wants to start,” she says, “but then it get stubborn.”

I step around her, climb into the driver’s seat, and turn the ignition. The car sputters and churns, then dies.

“Huh,” I say to no one.

Then, just as I’m about to give up, I check the gauges. Temperature, battery, and oil pressure won’t tell me much if the car isn’t running, but the last gauge will.

“I think I know what’s wrong,” I say.

“What is it?”

“You don’t have any gas.”

There is a pause, then a very quiet, “Oh.”

I climb back out. The two of us stand over the car like it’s a casket at a wake.

“Want me to call the gas station?” I ask her. “Maybe someone can run a can of regular down here. Or I could go get you some.”

She doesn’t answer me, which isn’t so strange. But she raises her face and hands skyward, which really sort of is.

“In the name of Jesus Christ the Risen Savior, I command this car to start!” she screams. Then she looks at me and says, “Try it.”

“Ma’am?”

“Try to start it again.”

The thought occurs to me that I am in the presence of a crazy woman.

“Everything is possible with the Lord,” she says, Lord coming out as Lawd. “I prayed in faith, and if faith can move a mountain, then it can sure get my car started and get me where God needs me to be. So try to start it.”

“Um, ma’am,” I say. “God ain’t gonna put gas in your car. Havin’ faith doesn’t mean you have to lose your head.”

“TRY. IT.”

Okay, fine.

I climb back into the car and turn the ignition. Nothing.

“Maybe you should be the one turnin’ the key,” I say through the windshield. “I reckon I just don’t have enough faith.”

“Fine,” she says. “Step aside.”

I do. She tries. No go.

“Would you like me to go get you some gas, ma’am?”

“No,” she says. “Thank you, but I’ll wait. God will send someone along.”

I let the fact that I just might be that someone slide, told her I was sorry and to have a good day, and left. As I pulled out of the parking lot I looked in the rearview mirror. She was standing in front of the car with her hands to the sky again, no doubt casting out the demons of fuel consumption.

Maybe I’m being too hard on her, I think to myself. But then again, maybe not. Because not only did that lady waste about fifteen minutes of my life, she also set a pretty bad example for Christians.

Yes, God can do anything. And yes, faith can move mountains. Put the two of them together, and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if somewhere in the history of humanity, a car managed to get where it needed to go without any gas.

But that’s not the norm.

Sometimes I think we count on a miracle too much. That sometimes we trust and believe that God will provide so we won’t have to do as much as He expects from us.

Because God is more than willing to get us where He needs us to go, and faith will help get us there.
But it’s up to us to make sure the tank’s full.

Moving on

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An acquaintance of our family recently passed on.

That’s the term we use here in the Virginia mountains, the term I’ve used in front of my children—“Passed On.” I’m fond of that term. It offers an image of moving rather than holding still. This person we knew, he may not be here any longer, but he is elsewhere. Laughing and living still. And waiting, for us.

Neither of my kids seem to be much impressed with “Passed On.” It still means the same thing, they say. Still means DEAD. To them, you might as well call a thing just what it is, and it doesn’t matter if you’re Passed On or Dead or if you’re Making A Trip To The Boneyard, it all means you’re gone and you won’t be back.

So my kids say. And though normally I’d take them both to task for believing such, I’m letting it pass this time. They have other things on their minds at the moment. Big things. Heavy things. You see, this is the first time my children have had to face the fact that sometimes prayer does not work. That sometimes, God says no.

They prayed nightly for our friend’s healing. It was right at the top of the list, the first petition after a good round of thank-Yous. Both of my kids possess in abundance that childlike faith the Bible says moves mountains. But not this time. This time, they are left with the hard truth that sometimes God delivers from death, and other times He delivers through it.

It’s a hard lesson for us all, no matter the age. A harder one, perhaps, is coming in the next months: that lesson of moving on, of having this person they’ve known and prayed over for years slip from their minds. They’ll ponder our friend, they’ll still pray for the family he left behind, but sooner or later dust will turn to dust and the cares of this world will move on. Sooner or later, we all move on.

That moving on is another kind of pain, a different one, yet my children will find it stings just as much.

The parenting books aren’t much help when it comes to situations such as these. Nor grandparents, nor pastors, nor close friends. They’ve all told me much the same—that life has a way of carving itself into you and hollowing you out. It hurts (oh yes, it most certainly hurts), but once that carving is done you find that the very God who once said no now says yes, and those deep grooves are filled with a grace and a love that makes you whole again.

I will tell my children this. I imagine it will not do them much good just yet.

But it will later. Oh yes, it will indeed.

Praying to the wall

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prayingHe looks up at me from under blankets that cover all but his head, round eyes like tiny moons in the night. He yawns, but those eyes ask me to stay. There’s something I need to tell you, Dad, those eyes say.

“What’s on your mind?” I ask, and for a moment the only sounds in the bedroom are the three Legos that topple from an overfull plastic tub by the door and the wind against the window. He wants to say, he doesn’t want to say, and so he looks at the ceiling and whistles. I ask him again.

“You know how we do devotion before bed? And then we pray?”

“Sure.”

“I don’t think I like the way you been prayin, Dad.”

Of all the things I think he can say—and there are plenty—I would have never thought that one.

“Why do you say that?”

The blankets around his head inch upward as his tiny shoulders shrug.

“Well,” I say, “if you think a thing, you have to have a reason for it…right?”

(Shrug.)

“You don’t pray like you used to,” he tells me. “You used to do it like you were talkin and you knew God was listenin. Now you do it like…I don’t know. Like you’re talkin to the wall, I guess, and you know the wall ain’t gonna answer.”

You don’t like those sudden revelations that your children aren’t really children at all, but growing men and women who see and hear and understand more than you think. And since this is something I really don’t want to discuss with a seven-year-old—or anyone, for that matter—I change the subject.

“How was your math test today?”

“Hard,” he whispers. “Lots of kids didn’t do so good, I think. They kept raising their hands, but the teacher wouldn’t answer them, she just watched. I think I did okay, though. What’s wrong with your prayin, Dad? Is it stuck?”

“I think so. Sometimes when you get older hard things happen. And even though you still talk to God, you get the sense that He’s not much interested in saying something back. That’s not true, of course, but you might feel like it is. It’s like you’re wrestling with something on your insides.”

The thought occurs that maybe I’ve said too much, but I haven’t. His little head bobs up and down on the pillow as if saying I hear ya, Dad, been there many a time myself. And I suppose maybe he has. You don’t have to be a grownup to wander from God and then ask Him why He moved.

“So maybe you’re takin a test, too,” he says.

“I think maybe you’re right.”

And he looks at me with those moon eyes that see and understand. His hands move from under the blankets to mine.

He says, “The Teacher’s always quiet durin a test, I guess. But He’s always watchin.”

Showing us what we can’t see

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image courtesy of photobucket.com
image courtesy of photobucket.com

I had no idea how far we’d walked—when you’re tromping through the woods with two kids, time drags on until it becomes irrelevant—but it was far enough that we were ready to turn around and go home. After all, it wasn’t as if we had a map to go by. All we had were stories.

“Maybe we should just pray,” my son said. My son, who announced last week that he wanted to be a preacher when he grew up. To him, praying is the answer to everything.

“I think God would rather we walk than pray,” I told him.

“Why, did you ask him?”

I didn’t answer. We pushed on through the brambles and found the river—at least that part of the story had been proven right—then decided to sit and watch the water. My daughter tried to spot fish, my wife tried to spot spiders, and I tried to figure out where we should look next.

My son, the future Preacher Man, looked into the blue sky peeking through green trees and said, “Our Father, whose art ain’t in heaven, Halloween be your name.”

“This way,” I told them. “I think it’s over here.”

Which wasn’t true at all. I had no idea where it was or even if it was, but you know about men and directions. Besides, it wasn’t like we could pull over at the next gas station.

My daughter said, “Maybe we should just go home before we get eaten,” which brought more prayers from the little boy in the back.

I reminded them of the value of a story, of how the whole world was made of them and sometimes they’re true and sometimes they’re not, and how sometimes the ones that are not have more truth. And when you come across a story about an old home forgotten somewhere in the mountains, you have to go look. You just have to.

So we trudged on—me, my wife, my daughter, and the Preacher, who was now calling down the Spirit to keep Bigfoot away.

Truth be known, I didn’t think we’d find a thing. Though the mountains here are littered with the remnants of pioneer homesteads, their locations are masked by either wilderness or the foggy memories of the old folk. But the directions I’d received turned out to be pretty darn close. It wasn’t long until the woods opened up a bit into an ancient bit of clearing, and wouldn’t you know it, there was something up ahead.

Of course that something was hidden by a couple hundred years of changing seasons. Trees and bushes and plants had reclaimed the area that was once taken from them. All that remained to be seen was a bit of foundation. The rest was enclosed by an impenetrable wall of overgrowth.

“Let’s try to break through,” my daughter said, to which she received a chorus of no ways.

“I don’t want to go in there,” my wife said.

“I’m too tired to try to go in there,” I said.

“We should really pray first before we go in there,” my son said.

Simply going back was no longer an option. We’d found it now, and to leave without at least a look around simply wouldn’t do. So we looked. All of us. We poked and prodded for weak spots, we tried to peek into what had likely gone unseen for centuries. We stood on tiptoes and jumped and, once, even tried to make a human pyramid. But it was no use. The mountains would not give up their secrets that day.

“Hey,” my son said, “I see something.”

He was knee-bent, face almost in the dirt, peering through the undersides of thorns and thickets.

“Hey, wow.”

The rest of us followed. Knees bent, faces in the dirt, peering through the thorns, we found holes just big enough to peer through. What lay on the other side was nothing more than the remnants of a stone foundation, but to us it was Machu Picchu and Stonehenge and Easter Island rolled into one.

It was then that I realized what my son had done. The little Preacher Man, too little to jump too high or tiptoe too up, had decided to use his smallness to his advantage.

He’d gone to his knees.

“You can see more if you get on your knees, Daddy,” he’d often said. “If you stand up, you just see what you can. But if you bow down, God will show you what you can’t.”

Those words, profound as they were, had always gotten him a rub on the head or a squeeze on the shoulder. Nothing more. But then I knew just how right he was, and I wondered just how much I’d missed in my life because I’d been standing instead of kneeling.

“I know you’re going to say no, but…”

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saynoIt was my son who approached me the other night after supper and prefaced his request to go play in the creek with, “I know you’re going to say no, but…”

He was right, I did say no. It was getting dark, it was already cold, and he had chores to finish and homework to do. But that preface bothered me a little.

“I know you’re going to say no, but…”

Meaning I must say no to him a lot. A whole lot.

And that bothered me to the point where I began keeping track of the ratio of yeahs and nopes I give my kids over the course of a normal day. Finished my research the other night. The results were…well, I’m not really sure yet what the results were. All I have is numbers. Their meaning is still up in the air.

According to my calculations, I tell my kids no about ten times a day. Where that fits on the scale of Excessive Parenting is debatable. Even I’m not quite sure. Considering how much I talk to my children, I suppose ten isn’t an unreasonable number. But when I consider the fact that for most of the day they’re at school and I’m at work, ten sounds like a lot.

In my defense, many of the things my children ask to either have or do are things few parents would allow. Few children should have an elephant as a pet or their own television show or be allowed to dress like thugs and prostitots.

They, of course, do not see the wisdom in my refusals. And I have no doubt I sometimes transform in front of their very eyes from Nice Daddy to Mean Tyrant. Once, my daughter even told me I wasn’t cool.

But stripped down to its most bare essentials, saying no is what parenting is all about. I’ve learned in my nine years of being a father that kids will ask for anything—anything at all—without much thinking involved. Their tiny minds are based on the principle of immediacy. It’s now they think about, and seldom later.

That’s where I come in. As a father with thirty-nine years of experience in later, I can testify to the wisdom found in keeping one’s eyes forward rather than the small amount of space at one’s feet. Life has taught me this one thing: everything leads to something else. Everything has a consequence.

I tried a little show and tell about this with my kids once. We were sitting by a pond. I told them to watch as I tossed a rock into the water, then explained how the things we do are like the ripples that come after the toss. They reverberate.

They didn’t get the lesson, they just wanted to throw some rocks of their own. To them, it was the splash that mattered. The ripples were inconsequential.

I can’t blame them.

I was like that once.

I often still am.

To them, I can be the mean parent who won’t let them have any fun. That’s okay, because God willing one day they’ll be mean parents themselves.

But there’s more to this.

The study of my ten-times-a-day No has made me realize I’m somewhat of a hypocritical father. It’s not always easy to answer my kids in the negative, but I’m comforted by knowing it’s for their benefit. Children need boundaries, and they need to be kept safe. And bottom line, they really don’t know what’s best for them.

That’s why it’s a bit disheartening to realize I act like them when it comes to the things I ask for from God.

He tells me no a lot, too. Probably more than ten times a day.

I once thought that was because He didn’t love me or because I wasn’t good enough. That I wasn’t worthy.

I know better now.

The truth is that He does love me, and that both His yes and His no come from that very love. Being good and worthy doesn’t matter much. I know it’s because I need boundaries and to be kept safe. And because bottom line I really don’t know what’s best for me.

And that’s okay.

Because He does.