“If they can’t figure it out at Mayo,” Amber says, “it can’t be figured.” She says this as she loads Titus into the minivan for the drive to Minnesota. She leans in, hugs me long, and buries her head in my sweater. “I love you,” she says. “Pray and be good.” I tell her I will, and not to worry about me.
“I won’t drink.”
“I know,” she says, then reaches upward and kisses me on the lips before slipping into the driver’s seat. She pulls from the drive, and I watch her taillights turn left as she leaves the neighborhood.
I have taken to praying for Titus more and more. As Amber pulls from the neighborhood, I begin praying my guts out. I can think of no better way to put it. This is no small thing. I am praying that Titus will be healed, even though I still hear the faith healer taunting my faith, still see the lesser version of me wasting away under his accusations.
“If you had enough faith, your son might be healed,” I hear. The implications rise: I am not a man of strong faith.
I wonder whether the folks who blame everything on faith or the lack thereof are doing the best they know how. Sometimes I wonder whether their good intentions have gone awry and mucked up this whole religion thing for the rest of us. If they thought it through, would they continue to foist the pressure of having mountain-moving faith on others?
I hear the echoes in the cavernous spaces of my heart and I sit with them. I listen to the accusations: that my faith is too small, that God is a liar, that he might not be God at all. I sit with them, allow them to say their piece, listen as they try to tempt my will to throw a temper tantrum, to kick against God’s shins.
I close my eyes and listen.
I will never leave you nor forsake you.
I hear it. I sit in it.
Go back to the mesquite trees.
I hear this too, and I imagine myself in the grove, braiding strands of long grass into a rope which I will attach to my Han Solo action figure so that he can rappel down the knotty side of one of the trees. I hear the wind, how it whispers through the grass and tells me I am not alone. I hear myself singing the songs of my youth while my hands are at work: humble yourself in the sight of the Lord, and he will lift you up. I always loved that song.
In those days, I was with God, and despite the world’s best attempts to either upend faith or saddle me with the pressure of mustering enough faith to prove my fidelity to God, I know the truth. God is still with me now.
The voices in the darker spaces grow higher pitched, but fainter. They are desperate liars, and I can hear the voices thinning. I sit in prayer, repeat the words of Christ at Gethsemane: not my will but yours. I pray it, and then sink into the mystery of knowing God, of God knowing me.
In the days of early faith, my proofs of God were in the wind, the simple songs, the whispers that the “ears of my ears” were born to hear. My proofs were the generosity of the church ladies, the midnight prayers of my parents over my dreams, the way the thunder rolled across the Texas plain, making me feel so small. The open sky, Kool-Aid at vacation Bible school—the nearness of God was palpable in these. God was close in the days when it was okay to rest in my smallness, when I needed no theological answer for every trauma of life. God was close when my will was, by its nature, bent low before an immeasurable mystery.
Yes, I will bow low like a child, bend my will to the will of God. And in the surrender—Lord, not my will—in the meeting of God, whether in Gethsemane or Eden, I’ll pray with more abandon. Perhaps I’ll rejoice in knowing the measure of Emmanuel, God with us in darker days. Perhaps I’ll see light breaking through the cave mouth, coming broader and brighter like the rising of some inner sun. Perhaps I’ll see that the God who was then and is now and is to come, whether in life or death, in sickness or healing, is here.
Yes, his promise is that he has never left me nor forsaken me. The thought steels my legs, props me upright. The thought brings me into the beauty that is God’s presence, and the words of E. E. Cummings’ great poem come before I can turn my thoughts back toward Scripture or prayer or any other sanctioned spiritual discipline.
i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
Yes. This is the way I’ll pray, today.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Open the eyes of my eyes to the unimaginable you, who is always and forever, who never leaves nor forsakes. Let me not doubt unimaginable you.