Fourth Sunday of Easter, April 21, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Praying in the rain
Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his mercy endures forever.
Many of our Empty Nester Sunday School class members spent the weekend camping north of Austin, playing games, eating great food including pecan pancakes, and enduring what was a rough weekend around here, with temperatures in the 60s and rain last night. I have loved camping in the past, but we didn’t make it this time.
One of my best camping memories included a deluge at a small state park near LeRoy, Illinois. My friend Ann and I chaperoned a group of 20 or so Vineyard kids. We had tents, we had campfires, we rented a couple of rowboats to explore the lake. And we had lots of rain, which started after we bedded down for the night.
The tents weren’t ready for the flood, water piled up on the tent tops, the roofs caved in, and there was moaning and gnashing of teeth all around us in the dark. Ann and I consulted and decided to go back to sleep as soon as we could. The kids followed our example, but really, nobody slept much the rest of that night.
And when dawn came, we looked around at each other and laughed. All of us were soaked. The kids wanted to take off at least some of their clothes, and that was fine with us. The after-storm sunlight warmed us all up quickly.
What made this such a great time? I think it was how we could pray and rest, not trying to fix anything. God, with his big thunder and lightning and rain, would do his work. We, with our kids from all corners of Vineyard country, would do ours. But in both my mind and Ann’s, we were servants and children too, nothing more. These kids belonged to God, as did we.
Seems like every relationship with others requires relationship with God first, as a foundation. But that’s tricky, because sometimes it seems like God is nowhere to be found. That may not be true, theologically, but I have many times felt lost and alone, even when I try to pray. Especially when I try to pray, really. If God is with me, who can be against me, Paul asks. But what if God is NOT with me?
It takes a lifetime to learn how to navigate this “dark night of the soul.” God hasn’t gone anywhere, but he is asking me to trust him more than I did before.
And it helps to have help, in the form of wisdom about living with God from the ages, wisdom from men and women who have gone through their own empty, agonizing prayer times, feeling nothing, hearing nothing from God. Henri Nouwen is one of those wise, suffering servants, who shares his lessons with us. Here’s one:
We cannot force God into a relationship. God comes to us on his own initiative, and no discipline, effort, or ascetic practice can make him come. All mystics stress with an impressive unanimity that prayer is “grace”— that is, a free gift from God, to which we can only respond with gratitude. But they hasten to add that this precious gift indeed is within our reach. In Jesus Christ, God has entered into our lives in the most intimate way, so that we could enter into his life through the Spirit. – Henri Nouwen
One of Nouwen’s contemporaries, David Steindl-Rast, titled one of his books, Gratefulness, The Heart of Prayer. Steindl-Rast knows of the dark days. He also knows God is not at our beck and call. But on the other hand, he is sure that God loves us more than we can ever even love ourselves. So he practices gratitude in advance:
True gratefulness is courage to give thanks for a gift before unwrapping it. This is the joy of trust, the joy of faith in the faithfulness at the heart of all things.
As I write the rain is pouring outside. I’ll go to bed soon, and listen to the rain pelt the window, and fall suddenly asleep. Praying all the while, knowing how close God is, whether I feel his presence or not. God is love.
See what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called children of God. Yet so we are.
 (Acts 4, Psalm 118, 1 John 3, John 10)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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