I am ever grateful for my job which is part-time at the moment. My income is far from impressive but what it gives me is priceless: autonomy, flexibility and the freedom to be fully available to my children. Even though my youngest is nearly 12, I find that the needs of all four in no way diminish as they grow older- including the ones in college. And those with car keys can produce the highest anxiety!
I am climbing no ladder nor bursting through any glass ceilings. I am simply doing what I feel is right- financially providing for my family, albeit modestly while trying, quite imperfectly, to provide for their emotional and spiritual needs. To ask tough questions, hold them accountable, deal in reality, speak the truth. and, most importantly perhaps, to “take the long view” with each and every one.
In the last two years of divided households, I have prayed vigorously for my children’s well being and future. I enumerated each of these prayers in more detail than you may have liked in an e-mail well before my blog was published. Here are some highlights: that they would desire the life they were created to live; discover their hidden gifts; hunger for wisdom; respond to grace, and last but not least, that love would awaken when the time is right.
It’s interesting because often we feel that in prayer we are not DOING anything, yet scripture teaches that the earnest prayer of a righteous person avails much. Righteous not in terms of our actions, mind you, but the condition of our heart. Righteous in terms of being in “right” relationship with God.
Prayer requires stillness, honesty, humility, gratitude and willingness to exercise fearless self examination and, ultimately, to relinquish control. Prayer can transform us. It can help wake us up from both our dreams and our nightmares. It can help us see the world with the eyes of our heart. It can help us not miss the beauty around us: the heron on the side of the road in an unexpected place – when it takes to the sky you can almost see the air moving under the thrust of its wings; the divine entanglement of trees in a rain drenched forest – one is built on a rock foundation, stretching for the sun’s light while cradled in the support of another; the ice cold river running over your bare feet while fish nibble at your toes; the torrential rain that stirs you from deep slumber and strikes awe and wonder.
Prayer can help us show up, and I mean really show up, for our children, our spouses and yes, even strangers. Last week as I was getting my oil changed, a woman commented on my laughing out loud while reading a good book. I engaged her in conversation and then, not unlike during a powerful encounter in Haiti, I decided to simply listen.
She told me of the moment when her daughter, then in college, told her she was gay and that when her daughter was two, she had knocked a baby doll on Christmas morning out of its stroller (and into next week.) She told me how she handled the news, and it seemed more beautiful to me than any response I could have imagined. She told me of her strained relationship with her grown son, and after learning I was a writer, which I can now say with a bit more confidence, she told me SHE had always wanted to be a writer. All I felt led to say was, “You still can. The world needs to hear your stories.” And sometimes the world is only one person.
You know what? I didn’t intend to write about prayer at all today. I wanted to write about how life is so beautiful, it hurts. Then it hit me. Prayer facilitates the tearing down of the fortresses we build around our hearts and allows us to see the painful beauty of the world as it is and receive a glimpse of what it is meant to be.
On a rock a friend of mine found along the Blue Ridge Parkway is etched this quote: In love time unfolds the beauty of life. Love is it, my friends. It’s why we’re here. God’s perfect love for us; our imperfect love in return which we need His help to even “accomplish”; the reflection of God’s love in the relationship between husband and wife; the fierce love of a mother for her child and protective love of a father; the devoted love of a friend; the necessary love of self; the miraculous love of a stranger.
We must risk it all to love, especially being hurt, because pain and heartbreak are inevitable. Ravi Zacharias writes, “To persist in love when we are tired or overwhelmed, or even rightfully angered by injustice is a massive and costly request.”
I wish to live no other way than with this kind of risk . . . and persistence. Recently my heart broke its silence in the form of this prayer, “Please don’t stop the work you’re doing in me, Lord. Bring it on: seeing eyes, hearing ears and vulnerable heart. I will brace myself for the pain which may be more painful than what I have known as well as for the beauty which will surely be more beautiful. Help me hear Your whisper – thank You for hearing mine.”
Frederick Buechner talks about the process of continuing to beat the path to God’s door in prayer even when our prayers are not answered in the way we would like, because God will surely bring us Himself, and this might indeed be the secret desire of each and every one of us . . . whether we realize it or not.
– Caroline Watkins
