Expectant Prayer

Thinking for a few days now about how to get back to the blog.  So much to write about.  But sometimes it feels like there is little to say that really matters.  Last week was busy.  There seemed to be a theme of looking at the big problems in the world and feeling small and helpless.

Then yesterday, bad news, the worst.  About a man I met once, at his own wedding, in the church of my childhood, to one of my best childhood friends.  We got married the same year.  We had our first babies the same year.  Used the same first name for our sons.  They have the same three initials.

Last night I watched out the kitchen window intensely aware of the traffic.  I peered  into the darkness as streams of headlights passed with drivers on their way home from work.  I prayed for my husband to come home, which he did.  I prayed for my friend who would face the first night in which her husband did not ever coming home again.  This morning I prayed God would be present with her as she awakened to a new morning facing yesterday’s loss afresh.

We have heard of much death lately.  The father of my husband’s best man taken by cancer.  The grandfather of a faraway friend.  And in the midst of this where is God?  Can He be present?  In the loss of a beloved husband and father?  Or even, in the process of the losing you know is coming.

Aren’t these the moments when the incarnation matters most?  Not while we are opening all the things we asked for, or didn’t, around the décor of a season we, for all intent and purposes, invented.  But right here in the midst of death, of husbands, of fathers, or grandfathers that we know.  In the sorrow of cancer diagnosis and treatment or the anxiety of the birth of babies with  complications.  Let’s face it, things get complicated even if your birth wasn’t.

And so  we pray and ask others for prayer and expect to be heard.  By God.  No one else will do;  only God.  The God who gives the only true comfort.  The author of the reason for our only true joy.  We ask that He meet us and our family and friends, or even strangers in foreign lands, with needs too overwhelming for us to imagine.  To comfort what no one else can even really understand.  To bring comfort, justice, peace and love in a world filled with sorrow, greed, self-sufficiency and indifference.  To allow laughter to follow sorrow even if it takes some time.

Blessings today for prayers expectantly prayed to the God who hears no matter where you are or what is going on around you.