That's the way I would describe the family I talked to on the phone yesterday. The family I'm talking about are good praying people with plenty of faith. They're hard workers, but their jobs went away. Now they're barely making ends meet. They've sold off things. They have to decide between paying the rent or the car insurance. And there are so many families like them everywhere in this economy.
I have a very strong "fixer" instinct and I found out the hard way a long time ago that my powers to fix up people and their situations are nearly nonexistent, much as I'd like to daydream about swooping in and rescuing them. That's why I'm a praying person.
So I got up out of my desk chair and went down to the hallway and started to walk a short circuit through the dining room, to the kitchen, through the family room and back down the hall again. I began telling God that I didn't know how to pray for this. I told Him how this was such terribly familiar territory for the family I had just spoken to. How many times in the past had they been through this, down to their last dollar, not sure how they were going to make it? How do you even pray with any kind of hope when you're prayed like this so many times before?
I kept walking and trying to focus myself on something positive as my bare feet felt the same pattern of cool hardwood floor hall followed by soft den carpet followed by hardwood floor again as I covered and re-covered the same small familiar circuit through the house.
Then, suddenly, out of nowhere, a small bubble of hope came. I realized that yes, it was true that I had prayed and re-prayed this "almost ready to lose it all" territory many times in the past for this family. But that wasn't a reason for discouragement, it was my very reason to hope! I'd lost sight of the fact that the Lord had always brought my friends through. Always. Somehow. Maybe they had to make painful decisions, but they always survived with God's help.
I saw that I had been using the past as a negative example, more like an "oh no, here we go again!" cautionary tale, dwelling on the problems while completely missing the fact that somehow, through God's help, my friends always kept on surviving.
I went back upstairs, still totally unable to to fix the family's financial situation I'd been praying about. But through prayer, God had "fixed" my discouragement and given me reason to hope. And pray. Again.
This morning I set out a little before sunrise on my morning prayer walk with an umbrella that I opened and closed several times as I walked in and out of sprinkling showers. When I was on the part of my walk where I pray for our men and women in the military, the gray clouds broke a little on the eastern horizon to let a warm misty glow of sunlight peek above the horizon.
For what seemed like the millionth time, there at the corner, I was asking God to again bless and protect our soldiers. But for some reason today I found myself saying, "Give them victory." As soon as I'd said these words, for some further unknown reason I stopped walking and looked toward the sky to my right away from the sunrise and saw a quarter of a rainbow.
I've been taking a prayer walk for more than 12 years and don't ever recall seeing a rainbow before. I stood there taking in the fragile band of phantom colors against the gray sky and thought about how a rainbow was a sign of God's promise to Noah that the earth would again be a good place to live and never again be completely destroyed.
Our son Chris served in Iraq several years ago. He's out of the Army now and doing well. Back then with Chris in a war zone I found myself unsure how to adequately pray for our son or for our troops. That's why I started a website www.militaryprayers.org where anyone can post prayers for our soldiers. So far we have 1,976 postings.
With all of those wonderful postings sometimes its hard to think of something new to say to God in support of our dedicated men and women who serve us so well under difficult conditions in and out of war zones.
On ordinary drizzly mornings just when you don't think you know how to pray, God sends you one word - victory - and a quarter of a rainbow. And it all fits together again. Prayer makes beautiful connections between promise and progress. God whispers how without a battle there is no such thing as victory just like without rain and sunshine together there are no rainbows.
Don't forget to pray for our troops even if you feel like you're saying the same thing over and over again. God is listening. Again.
I have an announcement to make. I'm going to be a first time grandmother. Very soon. As in next month. My son Jeff and his wife, Leah, are expecting their first child in August. It's a girl!
I can't imagine what it's going to be like to get to have fun with a baby girl. I'm the mom of three sons. I'm used to being outnumbered by guys in the house. Boys never let you decorate their bedrooms. They stop wearing cute little sailor suits the minute they learn how to say No! They love the ugliest toys - dinosaurs and things that morph into robots and tiny Lego pieces that hurt like the dickens when you step on them with bare feet. As teenagers boys have been known to eat a lot (at least they're not picky!) and laugh at each other's crudeness at the dinner table.
Of course having boys has had its advantages, too. When they got big enough I didn't have to help move heavy furniture any more. And I've never cut the grass. Of course I have raked up the clippings after them. Guys aren't into details.
Don't tell anyone, but one time when one of my sons was a baby (I won't reveal which one) I dressed him up in a little dress someone had passed onto me "just in case" before he was born. I just wanted to see what it might be like.
But ah, a little girl! What fun we'll have. Yesterday some of Leah's friends had a baby shower for her. I brought pink roses for the table and tied it with a pink ribbon with brown polka dots. Did I mention that boys don't do polka dots? They only do stripes. As the gift bags were opened there were plenty of cute bibs that said princess and drama queen and pink layette gowns and little dresses and crib sheets with yellow chicks and brown polka dots and even pink flowers! Heaven!
You'd have thought that would have been blessing enough for me for one day, but when we left the hostess told us to take home a party favor. It was a small glass with a brown candle in it. There was a little card on pink gingham paper that said:
Here is a candle for you today
To light when baby is here to stay
When you light its flickering flame
Say a prayer in Baby Barber's name
Now I'm absolutely positive I'm blessed from on high, because Jeff and Leah's little one will be given the gift of prayer the minute she enters this world. What an extraordinary gift to help a baby start out life being named before the Father in prayer by friends and family on the day of her birth.
Up until about 8 years ago I used to keep lists of prayer requests. Now I keep lists of answers to prayer in my journal and yesterday I received answer # 1,575 about the incorporation document I was trying to write for a nonprofit I'm working to start.
I blogged about praying about this problem a week or so ago, when the bullfrog plopped right into the lake where I was praying on my morning prayer walk and seemed to say, "Plop down in your office chair and get to work." So I sat down and went on the INTERNET and I found a site for my state on how to file for incorporation and also looked at the IRS site to include the right language to qualify for nonprofit status. There sure was a lot of "legalese" in it. But I took a little bit from here and a little bit from there and had something that looked pretty good to me. But was it right?
Yesterday our 19 year old son John and I met with our financial adviser to talk about his college money. I asked her if she knew anyone who did pro boon (as in free!) legal work for nonprofits and she told me to email my incorporation document over to her and she'd contact a lawyer friend.
I emailed it and that very afternoon I got it back from her lawyer friend with all sorts of small and important corrections in it and with a new paragraph or two added here and there. I was overjoyed and pulled out my journal to start writing the whole thing down as an answer to prayer.
Those who aren't sure how God works might be thinking, "Everything you've mentioned seems so normal - going on the INTERNET and looking up something and copying it, asking someone to help you, a lawyer doing a little pro boon work. What made you write down such a thing as answer to prayer # 1,575?"
Here's my simple formula for what qualifies as an answer to prayer: I prayed about something and then something changed in the situation.
In this case, I was one of the things that changed after praying. I got up and did something. I consider that a "presence" answer to prayer - God giving me the "MPH" to get going with a little more expectation and confidence than I would normally have on my own.
Then I asked someone for help. They knew someone who could help me. And presto - a nice legally brilliant (or at least correct) document appeared in my in box on the computer! I consider this part an "action" answer to prayer because something happened without my doing it.
But beyond all of that, the reason I am completely confidant that this is an answer to prayer is because God put his signature on the email that I got back from the lawyer I have never met. What was his last name? Cross. When you see a word like that in a business email, you know there's nothing to do but to thank Jesus for His help and gladly write it down as an answer to prayer.
He knocked on my door asking me if I needed any pine straw put down. Here in the south, they sell bales of pine needles and we spread them over natural areas to keep the moisture in and to discourage weeds from growing.
He said it would be $4.00 a bale. I said I could use a little around the side, maybe 15 bales. Spreading pine straw is not a hard job. All you do is throw it around. My husband Gordon usually does it, but I felt sorry for this fellow who looked like he could use a few extra dollars.
I closed the door and continued fixing dinner. He rang the doorbell about 20 minutes later and said he was through. I had already written a check for 15 bales at $4.00 each. He crouched down on the front sidewalk and avoided looking me in the eye and said that was $4.00 a bale for the pine straw and $4.00 a bale to spread it, for a total of $8.00 per bale!
I was flabbergasted. I told him that he'd only done 20 minutes worth of work. He said he had to pay $3.50 a bale for the pine straw himself and needed to make a living.
I was very confused and a little rattled, not sure what to do. I ended up giving him an extra $20.00 bill out of my wallet and thankfully he drove.
I felt taken advantage of and foolish. Whenever I'm befuddled like that, I need prayer immediately. I went up to my office and knelt down at the sink counter in the adjacent bathroom and repeated The Apostle's Creed slowly out loud as a prayer, picturing each part of the death and resurrection of Jesus.
Funny, there's not a single line in the Apostle's Creed that you would ever vaguely connect with it being the perfect thing to pray when you've just been conned and feel foolish. Maybe what I was doing was fighting lies with the deep solid things that I knew to be true. The Apostle's Creed states what we believe. It's good to cling to truth when you've been lied to.
So the next time you're up against lies, simply pray any truth about God that you know. Because truth is extremely healing and helps you regain your mental balance.
Yesterday our adult Sunday School class was talking about the Ascension, but we're a discussion class so sometimes we wander off into interesting territory. We were talking about why Jesus went off to heaven and left us to do His work here on earth. Then one woman asked the class, "Do you all pray for yourselves? I mean, I'd jump in front of a car to save someone else. It's not all about me."
A retired man sitting in front of me whose wife was home with chronic pain said, "Of course I pray for myself." A lot of heads nodded all around the room.
You already know from my last blog about the bullfrog at the lake that I pray for myself. But the question in Sunday school got me to thinking why I pray for myself. And what kinds of things do I pray for myself?
I asked myself this morning in quiet time what Jesus would say on this subject and I remembered how He told Peter in the Garden of Gethsemane, "Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the body is weak." (Matt. 26:41 NIV) And then it dawned on me that Jesus said this right in the middle of one of the most intense times when Jesus was praying so hard for himself that sweat was pouring off of Him.
Wow. If even Jesus prayed for Himself, I guess that's a pretty good reason to get cracking on praying for what's going on in my personal life. My friend in Sunday School who asked the question was really wondering, "Is it selfish to pray for yourself?"
Strangely enough, the real answer is that it's because we're so self-reliant that we need to pray all the more for ourselves. I guess I'll join Peter today and not just pray about what seem to be my biggest material needs, but also about my biggest blind spots and my wishful thinking about the easy way out.
Something surprising happened to me when I prayed today. At the end of my morning prayer walk I take a few moments to stand by the little pond along the road in our neighborhood. I go right down to the edge of the water and gaze out over the murky pond toward the rising sun.
This morning the scene was magnificent. There were purple clouds just on the east horizon that veiled most of the sun except for several golden gleams. Murky ponds make wonderful mirrors and I could see blue sky and white clouds in the water and dark green reflections of the trees on the shoreline.
Then a little breeze picked up, raking across the surface of the water toward me, turning the still surface of the water into a wrinkled piece of silk with each little ridge reflecting sparkling light.
Right now in my life I'm attempting to do things that I can't do by myself trying to form a nonprofit organization. This week somebody showed me a form from the Internet I need to fill out to file for incorporation. Yikes! Sounds formidable. O.K., some of you are probably thinking that it's a piece of cake. Yes, it looks simple. But we all have our gifts and comfort zones. Legal business stuff isn't mine.
So I decided to say a prayer that always helps when you need God's power to do something you can't do by yourself. Here's what I prayed:
"Lord, please make streams of life giving water flow from within me." (See John 4:14)
And then I added, "And I will stay here until I feel it."
At that very moment I heard a loud plop in the water about three feet from where I was standing. I was so startled I jumped back, scared. I saw a big ring in the water and realized that a good sized bull frog must have jumped into the water at the very moment I ended my prayer.
I had to smile. When I prayed about streams of life giving water, I had in mind more of a melodious sound of a waterfall or a fountain, not a big old uncouth "plop."
I guess during prayer there are times when sweet streams of peace move through us and other times when something goes "plop." So I guess I'll "plop" down in my chair in front of the computer and try to figure out this incorporation form. Thanks, Mr. Bull frog. Even though you nearly scared me half to death.
The Bible study I mentioned in my last blog is a 6 week study on the Lord's Prayer. Our leader, Rev. Parker, asked us to share with a discussion partner how we learned the Lord's Prayer.
It's always interesting to ask yourself questions like that about things that it seems like you've known forever. I think I learned it from sitting in church with my parents and hearing it recited out loud every Sunday. I probably had it memorized before I could actually read the words and long before I ever knew what the words "hallowed" or "trespasses" meant.
I just realized this morning that I learned a new twist on the Lord's Prayer in a very unlikely setting - in a college course on the origins of the English language. (I was an English major and the course was tough!) One of our assignments was to memorize and then recite out loud in class the Lord's prayer in Old English, which is more like a foreign language than it is like the English we speak today.
I've long since thrown away my text books, so I decided to look up the Lord's prayer in Old English on the internet and found the words that I struggled to pronounce. Here's one line. See if you can guess which line this is:
And forgyf ús úre gyltas,
I also found a u-tube site where someone actually recited the Lord's Prayer in Old English along with some haunting video. In watching the video, the line I've quoted above was the one that we could understand the best if someone spoke it out loud to us today: "And forgive us our guilts."
Listening to the Lord's Prayer in Old English helped me appreciate more deeply today that when we say "Our Father" we are included in a large fellowship of everyone on earth who has ever uttered this prayer throughout history. It's not our personal property, but rather the prayer of the church and the prayer of all humanity.
Say the Lord's prayer out loud today. And marvel how it connects us to God's heart, His purposes and His forgiveness every time, no matter what language we use.
I'm still thinking about how the silence of the mind helps us hear our hearts more clearly. I heard my heart last night when I drove an unemployed woman I'll call Tonya home from a church Bible study.
I hadn't seen Tonya for several months. I asked her if she had transportation these days and she said, no, she was using the bus. This may not seem a big deal in cities, but out here in the suburbs buses don't run that often and the stops are long walks from your home. And Tonya has trouble walking due to a medical condition.
She's been out of work since last winter. She's wondering how she'll pay the rent. She's got a son at home. Finances are challenging. The economy is down and finding work is tough.
All I had to offer Tonya was a lift home and a prayer in the car before she got out. I asked God to help her, guide her and provide for her. As I watched her walk down the sidewalk, my heart was filled with something that's hard to describe. My mind was telling me that Tonya's chances of finding a job soon weren't good, but my heart was telling me that God cared immensely for her and was taking every weary step along the way with her. I felt overwhelmed with a sort of holy awe for Tonya and the faith that kept her going each day.
I'm still struggling to define what I felt, but it was a continuation of the silencing of myself so that God could reveal His heart to me for his hurting people. It was a beautiful glimpse into His heart - filled with love and compassion, kindness, tenderness and mercy, even in the toughest of times when the answers to the biggest questions in life still haven't been answered in our minds.
I recently went on a five day silent retreat - no talking except in congregational responses in the daily church services.
I got to the retreat a little late because of schedule conflicts, so I missed the introduction about silence, so I did what everyone else did and followed the printed schedule.
During the last hour on the fifth day our siIence officially ended and I finally had a chance to talk to (and introduce myself!) to the dozen other women on the retreat. One remarked, "I found trying to silence my mind the hardest part."
Silence of the mind? I knew we were practicing "silence of the lips" but I hadn't heard of silence of the mind. As I thought back, that phrase really made sense. Even when you haven't said a word in days and even when no one else around you is chatting, your mind can still be talking up a storm and even screaming! (My mind goes into scream mode over electronic gadgets I don't know how to use properly.)
When I sit down to pray and meditate, sometimes it takes me a long time to stop thinking so hard about all of my problems and fears and plans and worries and make room in my mind for God's quiet whispers.
I guess instead of calling it silence of the mind I could call what happens when you get quiet with God as the speaking up of the heart, where you simply enjoy being there with God without thinking about what you have to do next or what you need. It's the warmest and most filling silence you can ever experience.
