Monthly Archives: March 2010

Seeds of Prayer

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I love to pray. As I see it, there’s no richer activity on this earth. After all, prayer is direct communication with Almighty God. What could possibly top that?

I didn’t always see prayer this way, though. Growing up, our family prayed like many other families: at mealtime…

  • “Dear Lord, we thank thee for this food,
  • We pray thee bless it, to our good.
  • Help us live thy name to praise
  • In all we do, through all our days. Amen.”

…and at bedtime. Mom would take turns kneeling beside each of our beds, praying different prayers over us. And of course I remember bowing my head in Sunday school and church.

But two distinct childhood experiences planted fertile seeds of prayer in me. The first occurred when I was eight. My sister Mary, age nine, was playing with a neighbor child who wanted to light a fire in his yard. Mary watched as he poured gasoline over twigs and papers, also splashing it on her jeans. When he threw in the match, a fireball engulfed everything at once, including Mary’s pants. The boy raced from his yard, through ours and into our house yelling, “Mary’s on fire! Mary’s on fire!”

It was Saturday, and Dad was home. He ran out the kitchen door, grabbing a throw rug as he stepped over it, hoping to smother the flames. As we rounded the garage, Mary came limping toward us, the fire out but her jeans charred and still smoking. She’d rolled herself in the dirt, which had smothered the flames.

Dad carried her inside, and as her whimpers grew to sharp cries, he gently tried to cut off her jeans to assess the damage. But Mary’s pain was acute, and the cloth had melted into her skin. Mom was weeping, holding our little brother, and suddenly my whole world felt like it was coming to an end.

I was told to stay out of the way and couldn’t do anything to help, but I did think of one thing. I ran to the living room, looked up at the ceiling and said, “Oh God, don’t let Mary die!”

After she underwent skin graft surgery and spent several weeks in the hospital, my prayer was answered in the affirmative. God let Mary live, and a little girl’s faith in the power of prayer started to grow.

The other defining incident occurred when I was 12. Our family received a phone call that caused Mom to wail like I’d never heard before as she hollered, “No! No! No!”

Our cousin had been killed in a car crash at 17. (Tomorrow’s blog) Once again I felt like we were all coming undone with the catastrophe of that night. But Dad took action and gave us hope. He said, “We better pray.”

The five of us kneeled down next to my sister’s bed, and he prayed while we cried. I don’t remember his words, but I do remember his urgency to get to prayer. And a middle-school girl’s faith in the power of prayer took another growth spurt.

As I got older, problems multiplied and decisions with consequence needed to be made. I found myself pursuing conversation with God more and more, needy for his involvement. (The December 12th post describes this journey.)

Today, as a widow with an empty nest, I have few demands on my time and no set schedule, letting me pray an hour or so a day. (By the way, reader, you factor into a nice chunk of that.) Prayer also whets my appetite for face to face conversation with Christ, an extravagance I know will one day be mine. Likewise, it can one day be yours.

As a child, I could never have understood why anyone would want to pray an hour a day. But if I live long enough, I hope to be praying even more than that.

“When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a (wo)man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face.” (1 Corinthians 13:11-12a)

Gratifying Love

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After writing last night’s post entitled “Love Letters,” today a dim bell rang in my head reminding me I’d already used that title. Sure enough, the day after Valentine’s Day, there it was: “Love Letters.” Was it a senior moment or a poor memory? Probably both.

While looking again at February 15’s blog, though, my eye landed on a comment at the end by “Anonymous”. He or she wrote: “I am envious of the love your husband had for you and the love you had for your husband. That unconditional love has eluded me.”

I got a pang of sadness for that commenter and for Nate. The sad truth is that although Nate definitely loved me unconditionally, I didn’t always love him back that way. I felt so secure in his devotion to me I often took his love and him for granted. I’ve written this truth “between the lines” of my blog but haven’t said it outright. Let me set the record straight, Anonymous.

It’s been my nature to expect the best from people, particularly our children, and then when they deliver, to expect more. Years ago Nate and I attended a parenting conference during which a powerful statement from the speaker impacted me: “Expect the best of your children and they’ll live up to it.”

That plan can be taken too far, however, if parental expectations seem never to be satisfied. The second problem is treating a spouse in this way. I erred in both categories.

But it’s interesting that once we received Nate’s cancer diagnosis, my expectations ceased and my wifely faults suddenly stood out like lighted billboards on a dark highway. I remember walking on the beach with my sister just after we learned of the cancer, telling her, “I realize I haven’t been the best wife, but I am going to be, from this moment on.”

While Nate was sick, it was my greatest joy to love him unconditionally. But it took knowledge of a fatal illness for me to stop “expecting more.”

Years ago, Nate and I became friends with a couple we met through his work. We had much in common with them until it surfaced that the husband was having an affair. As soon as his wife found out, she divorced him. The affair fizzled, and sadly, a short time after that, the man had a sudden heart attack and died.

Nate and I often talked about whether or not our two friends might have tried to restore their marriage, even after the torture of the affair, had they known he was going to die so soon. My guess is their answer would have been, “Yes”.

Our marriage was good, but it could have been better, had I reciprocated with unconditional love like Nate’s. What could be more gratifying than a husband and wife trying to outdo each other in loving the other person more? Since it was easy to love Nate like this after he became sick, why couldn’t I have done it when he was well?

If he was sitting at my elbow as I typed this, he’d say, “What are you talking about? You were a great wife.” But that’s just it. Those would be the words of unconditional love.

As I pray daily for my blog readers (which includes you, Anonymous), I pray for strong marriages, that husbands and wives will have eyes to see each other as if their lives already had end-dates on the calendar. If we were willing to love unconditionally despite the sacrifices required, God would respond with blessing beyond our wildest dreams.

The end of Anonymous’ comment on February 15 was, “I’m so happy for you that you’ve had this very precious gift.”

Well said… a precious gift, given freely, without expecting anything in return. The Lord operates that way too, giving and giving more. If we decide to give back, he gives again, piling blessing on blessing. And this is our example for marriage.

“All of you should be of one mind. Sympathize with each other. Be tenderhearted, and keep a humble attitude. Don’t repay evil for evil. Don’t retaliate with insults when people insult you. Instead, pay them back with a blessing. That is what God has called you to do, and he will bless you for it.” (1 Peter 3:8-9)

Love in a Crawl Space

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Before we moved from Illinois to Michigan, the girls and I emptied a very full crawl space measuring 25 ft. square. The most valuable thing in it was a trunk-sized cardboard box I hadn’t looked into since before we got married.

But it was time to downsize, and we needed to be cut-throat about trimming debris from our lives. The box was marked “Memorabilia” and I had no idea what was inside. It was also marked with water stains from a basement flood two houses back, and I wondered if the box was even worth opening.

After peeling off the dried out, curly-edged masking tape, I opened it to find every letter I’d received during high school and college years, each one still in its envelope, the oldest with four cent stamps. In a day without cell phones, texts or Facebook, handwritten correspondence was the only way we kept in touch. The letters were organized by author, nearly 30 different people, each stack secured with a rubber band and ordered by date. Although the rubber bands had rotted and the letters were stuck together, all were readable.

Tucked in the bottom of the box were my journals from the same time period. Although I didn’t have the letters I had written in answer to the ones I’d received, my journals showed what was on my mind.

After finding the letters, I went upstairs and announced to Nate I’d be taking a few days off from packing up the house to take a trip down Memory Lane. I invited him to join me, but he smiled and said, “No thanks.” He knew how goofy I was as a kid and had better things to do than wade through hundreds of old letters.

Every evening after dinner I “descended” and sat among stacks of boxes that were packed and ready for our move. Author by author I went through the massive letter-box, “visiting” each friend and our shared past.

There were cousins, girlfriends, boyfriends, my sister (after she went to college), my brother (after I went to college), my parents (mostly lectures-in-envelopes), and a number of letters from military guys fighting the Viet Nam war. The whole assemblage was a storyline of life in the sixties, from the peaceful beginning of that decade to its tumultuous end.

I’d forgotten most of the details in the letters but certainly remembered the people. After reading what the girls had written, I packaged those bunches up and sent them to each author. Some guffawed, some cried and some went through a crisis after reading their own writings. As for the guy letters, I read each one, then filed them all in the recycling bin.

The most interesting part of my trip down Memory Lane was to note how all of us had changed, what decisions we’d made since the sixties and who was doing what now. Some have compiled many years of marriage, others had suffered through divorce. Some had no children, others had lots. Some now live in foreign lands, others haven’t gone much of anywhere. Some are wealthy, others are struggling. And a handful have already graduated to eternity.

The letter-box had nothing in it from Nate. That’s because once he and I got to writing, his stack grew so well, it needed its own box. I kept that “set” to open after we’d moved. Going down our own private tour of Memory Lane would be, I thought, something the two of us would have time to share, once we moved to Michigan.

But God had a different plan, and we never got to open that box. My guess is that Nate now owns all knowledge of our past, even without the letters to jog his memory. It no longer matters to him like it still does to me. I believe when we get to heaven, we won’t have forgotten a thing. To the contrary, we’ll probably remember everything more precisely.

One of these days I’ll “descend” to our Michigan basement and open that box marked “Letters from Nate” to make that  trip down Memory Lane by myself.

But not yet.

“The memory of the righteous will be a blessing.” (Proverbs 10:7)