40. My Prayer

Mounds is driving like a lunatic, telling me he’s never in forty-two years of life seen that much activity show up in a concentrated place. He’s talking about how the instrument he built from scratch is able to detect spiritual entities and he’s explaining this and that but I’m a little overwhelmed myself.

He doesn’t have to convince me that what we saw was something supernatural.

The wolves would have been enough. But of course I have the leather band.

When we arrive back in Solitary it’s dark out, and Mounds asks if I need a ride home. I tell him thanks but I have my bike. Then he finds his coat in the back and grabs his wallet.

“Here’s six twenties, and there’s more when I get it,” he says. “Man, you’re like my lucky charm or something.”

I hold the money that’s not blood money but something I earned.

Even if I did it in a weird way.

“I’ll call you when I’m going out again. I gotta get these findings down in my journals and then blog about them.”

He hands me a card that gives me his blog address and other information.

I just want to go back home.

Who knows what’s waiting for me there.

Nothing supernatural or extraordinary.

But before I go to bed, I do try and see whether I can get another message from the other side.

Or maybe from one of those spaces in between.

I grab the Bible that my father once gave me and that Iris recently regifted to me.

As the wood in the fireplace is crackling to life, I close my eyes and open the Bible randomly.

I look down at a chapter from Ezekiel.

I start reading and then I glaze over, not really getting what I’m reading.

Then this message came to me from the LORD: “Son of man, turn and face the south and speak out against it; prophesy against the brushlands of the Negev.”

Well, this is helpful if I know any Negev, but you know …

“Tell the southern wilderness, ‘This is what the Sovereign LORD says: Hear the word of the LORD! I will set you on fire, and every tree, both green and dry, will be burned. The terrible flames will not be quenched and will scorch everything from south to north. And everyone in the world will see that I, the LORD, have set this fire. It will not be put out.”

I shut the Bible and then wait until the fire is fully going. As I do I fasten the leather band on my left wrist.

Maybe not everything has to have a message or a point. Maybe you don’t magically get a message every time you open the Bible.

Maybe the whole point is to open the Bible. And to keep opening it.

And to pray.

In this room with Midnight on my lap, sleeping in a contented way I can only dream about, I pray that God will show me the way.

I’ve heard people say that before, but it’s okay.

I need to be shown the way. It’s not just a cliché. It’s my prayer. It’s my need.

Not long after that, I fall asleep just like that.

And I actually do sleep as soundly as the Shih Tzu next to me.