To Those Who Only Pray

To Those Who Only Pray

(“I’ll put my Law within them and will write it on their hearts. I’ll be their God and they will be my people.” Jeremiah 31:33b)

Why follow around the latest train of thought
when deep in your own heart, within your finest mind,
the love that transcends every judgement is dwelling,
just waiting for you to use it.

We sing refrains, pray down the rain,
lay hands on the sick and practice singing
(except if we sit next to the last one to give us offense.)

Why keep praying for the one whose pain
has not abated in over a decade? If your prayer for healing
has not been answered,
could it be there is a different dance you are being asked to learn?

Please pray, but when the pain does not subside,
why continue to hide in your prayer closet while the
sufferer resides with his pain? One remarks, “I thought
God answered prayer.” And he replies, “I thought so too.”

What does the heart of God say when the disability threatens
to destroy the livelihood of one you’ve prayed for this long?
Have you visited him to hear his story?
Do you wither when you hear he is angry?
Who needed more faith? And so, with no promise,
he waves goodbye while the prayers keep humming.

Did you know you have within you
the love that can destroy mountains?
Did you know, planted in the heart of you,
there are treasures to give to the one who has gone

From anger, to depression, to
fully numb. Where has the love gone, and where
does it come from? Would you open your gifts
and sing to him on his blazing days? Would you open
your gifts and break bread with him on his darkening days?
Would you fend off judgement and fear, and simply listen to hear
the silence of the days when he is stunned into wordlessness?
Would you buy him a one way ticket home?

Hear the hurt without your doctor’s degree. Receive the story
without the gavel in your hand. Love his sorrow without the jokes
or aphorisms, the words that meant so little when your heart was
broken too. See his silence as the evidence that
he feels no one has listened to a word he said. Take his head
at face value.

Naturally, we want miracles. Miraculously, God gives us nature and
love that steps into the deepest pain; the pain our prayers have not broken,
and stays, simply stays

The way Jesus stayed on the cross of suffering,
and stays with us still when pain is unexplained by any
verse of scripture, any sharpened sermon, or platitudes the
faithful have memorized forever.

You, dearest friend, have the very presence of God written in your heart.
Go, see, cry, awake and be
the answer to the prayers that for a decade
you have sought.