Children gone. Children in college hundreds of miles away. Wife works in another state. A week goes by. No one in the house but me.
Looking. Looking around. Praying. Praying silently at home, at work. Praying out loud, out of a book at home. Praying, Help my son grow up. Give him self-confidence. Give him boldness. Give him delight in his own accomplishment. Give him excitement in his work. His school work. Give him vision, that he may see where all this is going. Where all his work, step by step, can take him. Where all his sometimes tedious and boring and silly and empty work can take him. Help him to see the evil that is in him, that is attacking his discipline, that is defeating his joy, that is dismembering his love of you and what you have for him, and help him to cast this out. To heave it from the windows of his soul like so much garbage.
Praying, Help my daughter preserve her boundaries. Help her protect herself. Please give her boldness in the preservation of her person, of her soul. Give her understanding of the evil of others so that she will be wary of them. So that she will keep herself separate from them. So that she will refuse their entrance. Defend her from those who delight in cruelty. From those who would carve her gently, pretending to love her, into so many pieces. And give her a way to gauge the relative importance of the work she takes on sometimes. Give her the discipline to say no, Lord. To refuse the hurricane sea of others’ requests. To walk away from that sea. To separate what is important to do from what is important for others to do.
Praying, Help my wife regain her hope. Regain her sense of purpose. Find her life again now, after raising her children. After that work is done. To find a new vector for herself that is neither me nor the children. That belongs entirely to her. A work in which her work matters. Give her knowledge of you. Personal and direct knowledge of your holy presence, wherever she cares to look. Whenever she thinks to listen. Whether she believes or not. Show her yourself, the evidence of yourself. Make yourself plain as the nose on her face.
And as I’m praying these things, silently. Alone at home. I’m looking. Looking. In the living room. The family room. The TV room in the basement. Looking in the kitchen, for Pete’s sake. In the dining area. In the bedrooms. Out on the deck in back. Morning after morning. Evening after evening. On the weekends.
For God. For God, himself. And this morning, as I’m thinking nothing in particular. After a morning of prayer and not prayer. Of prayer mixed in with taking out the garbage. With cleaning some items. Putting the tablecloth on the dining room table. With picking up the dead Japanese bugs that look like lady bugs that invaded my house last fall and that I kill or pick up dead every day since. And now it’s spring. Disgusting, biting little beasts. Mixed in with reading. With showering. With breakfasting. With calculating sums. With estimating the effects of compounding. With thinking about college costs and what I’ll need to put away, if I ever hope to retire. And I really don’t. What I have today in the 401K. What corners may be cut. What future earnings may be. How long this job may last. What other jobs there may be.
This morning as I’m walking down an empty corridor at work, one of the early ones. No one around. The corridor quiet. Peaceful. The parking lots mostly empty, still. This early in the AM. A few vehicles clustered around the factory entrances. Suddenly you enter the corridor from the left in the person of an actual human. Shocking, I am so deep into all my thoughts and prayers and no thoughts, just motoring down the corridor, minding my own business. Preparing. Dreaming. Semi-expecting. Semi-not. My mind machine grrring away.
And in this particular case, you have chosen a young man. A man with light brown hair. Maybe close to six feet tall. With a goatee. A goatee. A stranger. Someone I do not recognize. A human I do not recognize.
But suddenly here you are. Here you are. I can see you in his eyes. That this is you. Suddenly you. At a time of day when one is not really fully expecting. Not really prepared. And so. I. I. Thank you. I think. For re-appearing. For making one of your periodic appearances. Even though I have nothing to say. Even though my general silence has my tongue. Even though I’m a little weird. A little spooked. A little bugged. A little quiet and scurrying. And shook. A little unsettled. As I say, Oh. To myself. Oh. Oh. And oh. I should have said something. I should have said good morning or something. I should have said, What a fine day, even though it’s raining. I should have said, Thank you for the rain. All the way to my office. Thinking of what I saw in those eyes. Thinking of that look. That I-recognize-you look. That I’ve got you on my mind sort of a look. But I’ve got other things to do now. I’ve got other business to attend to. So be about your business. And I’ll continue on with mine.
Saturday, November 11, 2006
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