The Prayer

God, you are really wrecking my life. I used to be comfortable and content. I felt like my days were full of joy and meaning and......well, fullness. I had finally gotten my life together after some really stupid years. I have heard your promises murmured in my darkest moments, felt the jolt and resounding stillness of their power, and I have believed in them. I still do. You have pulled me from my bed when I couldn't move my feet and you have gently unfolded your plan for this family. You have let me be in the depths, and you have pulled me from them so I would have no doubt that you are what sustains me. You have followed through. Always. I see in this family your ancient promises manifesting themselves in real and present ways. In the story of my children, I can see you woven in the tapestry like a glittering cord, can feel you as Aslan moving in and through the details. I have found contentment in what you have provided us, and I have shared it.  I have fled from your presence and then collapsed in the knowledge of your absence and you have found me there and whispered my name and heard me say in exhaustion, "Here I am."

But we've come so far from the depths. Today we walk hand-in-hand in the light. I fall in love with you when I read the scriptures because it tells the story of how you've always met your people where they are and guided them safely home. It's my story. I seek your face; I see you everywhere I turn. I am free. We're GOOD here, God. Why are you wrecking me again? Why, when I am finally secure, are you sending me reeling?

I was under the impression that once my faith became my own, I could revel in contentment until a Major Sign came along and everything lined up just right to show me my Big Calling for your kingdom, which I would complete with ease and certainty like my friends who say that God always wanted them to be a doctor or a teacher or a park ranger (I don't know). I knew I was a little behind these friends, but I thought at last my time had come. I thought being a follower of Christ meant that for the most part I could do life like everyone else around me and because I love Jesus and choose joy, I would feel full and complete and good Christian-y. I did feel that way, for a time. And now, here we are.

I weep at unspecific thoughts of the insurmountable injustice of the world. My voice shakes when my family gathers to pray for a specific country at the end of the day; I can't even say "And please bless Bangladesh" without ruining my eyeliner and scaring my children. I read about poverty and the orphan crisis and look at pictures on Reece's Rainbow and I am reduced to blubbering rubble. I come to my husband in tears with talk about canceling cable and selling mass quantities of possessions and moving to either the projects or an empty farmhouse with a pond and I scare the crap out of him. I read books about people who leave what they know and just start walking, and their stories speak to the depths of my soul. I share their desperate urgency to leave the noise behind, to get to the stillness. I love our village and community and church and family and friends, and yet lately my heart breaks for the ways those things are incomplete. I send random, nonsensical texts and alarm my friends. Christina sits me down in front of coffee and asks all the right questions--"Are you worried about something?" "Stressed?" "Burned out?" "Are you depressed?" I bawl and rant about the fragmentation of life and cling to my white mocha like it's a headboard in the North Atlantic. I choke out over and over, "Something is just WRONG!" because I am, at this point, inconsolably devastated over a thing I can't even name. I am ugly crying in the middle of Starbucks like a deranged person and it's getting me nowhere.

And you know the moment it started. You started it, months ago, with a breath. You heard me whisper, "Goodbye, Evie" and saw me basking in the glory of your riches, where I had finally found solace and contentment, and it was in this perfect moment that I heard your voice whisper back, "She exists." You interrupted my reverie and dumped ice water into my veins, and the ice turned to that warm permeating knowledge that settled into my bones and I knew then it was you.

"What do you mean?" I asked. "What do I do with THAT?"

"Get up and go. Find her."

Find her? Excuse me? What kind of a vague assignment is that? Where's the revelation that I should go back to school to become a hospice nurse or social worker or aura reader? (I would have taken it, God. I would have.) Where's the direction? Where's the purpose? In one instant I grasped that there was MORE, lots more, and at the same time lost my sense of security in the life you've given me, the life you've BLESSED me with. I found myself up night, reading and chewing and tasting passages that suddenly haunted me:

The accumulated clutter of day to day existence--the lapses in conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison if your genes--all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and by the seriousness of the task at hand.  (Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, on mountain climbing)

Every part of my body hurt. Except my heart. I saw no one, but, strange as it was, I missed no one. I longed for nothing but food and water and to be able to put my backpack down. (Cheryl Strayed, Wild, on hiking the Pacific Northwest Trail alone)

You'd think walking would be the simplest thing, she said at last. Just a question of putting one foot in front of the other. But it never ceases to amaze me how difficult the things that are supposed to be instinctive really are.  (Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry)

That last one, especially. Because all you said was go. And the others--they're starting to make sense only as I write. It's as if you said Come, draw closer to me and my heart's cry is YES, let's throw off everything that hinders and DO this thing--and my heart is grieving for the things of this world that are broken and fragmented and the things that hinder and I want everything that is excess stripped away until all that's left is your will being done on earth as it is in heaven. Because it hurts, being in this world. And you're not so comforting, some of the time.

I don't know where this command leads. I don't even know, for goodness' sake, if it leads to an actual child or if you're just appealing to my appreciation for symbolism and irony. (Although that would be sick, God. Really sick.) I have no clue what exactly you have in mind this time, and that makes it very much unlike the other times you've spoken.

But all this doesn't mean I'm not going, but I guess you already know that. I'm usually a Psalms 16:3 kind of girl, but I have a feeling that this time you've got something specific in mind. What I know for sure is that I need to be stripped down until I am just one foot in front of the other, following you instinctively. Give me the strength and wisdom to do what it takes to gain clarity.....and if I weep, let it be as a man who is longing for his home.

Amen.