The Prayer I Still Cannot Live Without
I start with Cute. I start with Love. Because who does not want this right now, this very moment??
When horrific storms loom, and as we enter the next round of political losers, braggers and ousters----shall we turn to the otters?
Here, the dear creatures who swim around my island so languidly, so full of love and protection for their babies.
Do you see that little baby face?
Ten days into a grueling speaking tour, I am joyful as I write this---because of a prayer. (I can even follow the daily news because of this prayer.) A prayer spoken before I left. No margins. No downtime. Two weeks of back to back events, and a college tour after that and a wisdom tooth extraction (for my son) on the way home.
And those days of, another pregnancy? Another child? Another book? Another death? Another more of everything I haven't got?
And for many of you, another illness? Another prodigal child? Another foreclosure? Another fight?
We ask, "Are you really asking MORE of me again, God?"
I think Jesus might join us in this refrain. In the gospels, when he and the disciples find out that the one they all loved---John the Baptist---had been murdered, they fled in a boat across the sea to find some lonely quiet place to grieve this unspeakable act. They arrive at this "desolate place" but look---thousands, yes thousands are there before them, the worst kind of thousands: the sorriest neediest lot of humanity ever seen, and all of them shouting, milling, crying out for help. All wanting the touch of this magician's healing hand.
This grieving Jesus, what did he pray as he stepped out of the boat?? Oh Lord, not the pathetic masses again? Father, just give me some peace and rest for once, would you?
If Jesus was fully a man, surely he prayed something like this under his breath.
Why does God keep calling us to things we cannot do? More than this, his messenger Paul had the gall to implore us to rejoice in the white-hot center of our worst stressed-out mess! "Rejoice in the Lord Always!!"
But No, He is not cruel. Ten days in, I am exhausted but rejoicing. ALmost 17 and 19 years after birthing those mid-life babies, I am rejoicing. Six years after multiple deaths, one month after finishing another book, I am praising God. For God has done it. God has answered my face-down prayer again and again, even when I did not see it at the time.
And the words of that prayer? Not Jabez’ prayer
'Oh, that You would bless me indeed, and enlarge my territory, that Your hand would be with me, and that You would keep me from evil, that I may not cause pain.
No, not that. As I climb out of the boat each time facing multitudes and messes I have no strength or ability for, what do I pray? Not "enlarge my territory" but
“Lord, increase my capacity.”
They are not words from Scripture. They are not holy inspired words. They are simply the words from an often overwhelmed heart and body:
“Lord, increase my capacity.”
Because my natural heart is a one-seat leaky dinghy with broken oars and a rotting line that will not cross the sea, and will not throw out a line or an anchor on any hillside hospital for anyone. So----
“Lord, increase my capacity.”
And He does. The years spool by and the boat slowly lengthens, the hatches open, the galley seats two, then five, then dozens;, the engines rumble across a pond then the ocean, and soon the ferry carries more than I can count sometimes. And each one is a wondrous marvel, easy to love. There is even room for me.
How does He do this? The same way he does all of this:
He cannot not fill the impoverished, empower the weak, beautify the plain, overflow the destitute, make peaceable the angry, make bounteous the miser, dazzle the dim.
It is His very nature. As nature itself shows us.
All we need do is ask. Each morning we awake and step out of our sleepy boat to a needy throng on a hill we thought was ours alone, Let us breathe,
“Lord, increase my capacity. Make me more like you.”
And He does.
(And my prayer for our hot-tempered leaders: "Lord, Decrease their territory. Make them more like you.")
