Even in my doubts, I’ve always been a believer. When I was a kid and heard in Sunday school that God knows how many hairs are on my head, my cynical ass decided that when I got to heaven (even in my doubts, it existed), I would trip God himself up by demanding he tell me the number — as if I even knew it myself. Now, one half of my two children continues to claim he’s an atheist even as he pronounces from the sidelines of his brother’s soccer games that, if the team is losing, “God must hate us.”
The apple does not fall far from the contradiction-ridden tree.
In part, at least, to his autism and my anxiety, both of us are hyper-focused on details to the point of missing the forest on the regular. I am not a big-picture person, and neither is my older son: we get tripped up on microscopic issues and drive each other crazy in our sameness (you haven’t lived until you’ve had a morning-spanning argument over the poky part of a sock). And don’t get me started on trying to explain that if you’re such an atheist, then you forfeit your right to get mad at God about your team not winning, and also, God isn’t yelling at you through an L on a Saturday morning because he has bigger things going on … right?
When I lived in New York, one of the most memorable sermons I ever heard Tim Keller give was on God’s control, and without getting into the … well, theological details of it all, I’ll relate to you the part that made it so memorable: at the end, he verbally recounted the series of tiny events that had to occur in order for him to end up in New York City, and it basically came down to an open door and Watergate. It was then I realized that if both the devil and God are both in the details, then God works way harder.
This work, of course, is in the name of love, though you couldn’t have told me that when I was growing up. I was more rooted in the idea that my son currently espouses, in which God is just ruining all the fun all the time, probably, in the words of Jack Handey, because of something I did. Walking with my kids through their own doubts and questions allows me to revisit my own thorny childhood awareness of God and the belief that most of what he was doing was a response to me and my imperfections. Now, however, because of experiences with therapy, Lexapro, and Jesus, I get to tell my kids things like, “It will all be ok in the end, and if it’s not ok, it’s not the end,” and actually believe it because of his faithfulness over the decades which, it turns out, has nothing to do with me.
A friend told me recently that while riding to the store with his mother, he watched as she prayed for a parking spot, and how his cynical sensibilities were taken aback because it all felt a bit too much like a meme come to life. At which point I thought about how much I hate it when people reduce life and faith to memes, and then, about how I totally still pray for parking spaces (albeit silently). I realize now that I spent most of my childhood in a sort of functional atheism: saying I was a believer but living as though everything depended on me. Now, though I’m forever tempted to still live that way, I’m becoming daily more aware of all I don’t know or control. (Kids, carrying your heart around with them outside your body and all, will do that to you.) But if Anne Lamott is right and the three basic prayers are “Help, thanks, and wow,” then help is the one God is hearing most from me, and he’s hearing it about every little thing.
And though he heard it from me as a child as well, it came more from a place of fear than it does now. Then, I prayed as a sort of last resort, a lifeline thrown to a God I wasn’t even sure liked me (if he did exist in the first place); now, I ask for help as one who knows that whether or not that help looks the way I wanted it to, whether it shows up visibly at all, it is still there, in every breath and prayer. If anything, prayer is the details, the stream of consciousness I offer up to God in a never-ending conversation that covers everything from life-and-death issues to, yes, parking spaces and soccer games.
When I was a teenager someone gave me (suggestively?) the book Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff (and It’s All Small Stuff), and boy if I didn’t misuse that to nearly the degree I did The Rules a few years later. Though there’s some worthy material between its pages, it’s also described as “a handbook for stress-free living,” and I just have to laugh because on what planet might I find such a life? Jesus himself told us that in this life, we’d have trouble. But that fact is sandwiched between two others: that in him we have peace, and that he has overcome the world. I’ve found (through trial and error sometimes more than faith) that this peace is found not in parking spots or winning games or even memes, but in his presence.
If I’m honest with myself, there are times when I’m praying for the small things because I’m entrusting them to God, and there are times when I just want him to make my life easier. And so does he. But the part I also know now — that I didn’t always — is that, across all those moments and motivations, his love never wavers. I take great comfort in that tiny detail noted in Mark 10:21, when a rich man comes up to Jesus asking for a list of things he has to accomplish to win eternal life. When the man responds that he’s marked every item off the list, Jesus responds by telling him the one thing he knows he won’t be able to do — but not before, Mark notes, “Jesus looked at him and loved him.” This detail, like countless others through which God has revealed himself to me, matters because I’m in the details — and anywhere I am, so is he.
awesome post Steph. I, too, pray for parking spots and hangover cures etc etc. it’s a prayer to the universe.
So good!
One day a man was driving around a city late for an appointment. He was desperate for somewhere to park, but every space was taken. Eventually, he remembered hearing about people who pray for parking spaces and thought he should give it a try. Not being comfortable with the idea, he could only manage a quick and quiet mumbled appeal for help. Immediately, he turned a corner and spotted a free parking space! He wound down his window, and shouted up at the sky, “It’s ok. I found one!”