PRAYER

Preachers used to tell this story about a guy who prayed for help after his boat capsized out at sea. Apparently the story goes that a man was treading water when passers by offered a life preserver, a raft and even a ladder from a coast guard chopper among other forms of rescue. Nevertheless the man rejected the assistance exclaiming, “I’m waiting on God to save me but thanks anyway. He’ll come through for me.” I used to love when the preachers told that story thinking, even as a young man, “Really? This dummy is too dense,” only to realize later that I have a lot of fantasy in my theology. There’s a lot of mysterious-ness that wards off the help that would rescue.

And I wonder if you’d be able to provide an anecdote that affirms this truth in your life? I used to pray for ways to be involved with sports as a mentor and poof, a coaching position opened and was offered to me. It was a head coaching position but I hemmed and hawed about how coaching would take time away from refining my character development business. (Sometimes it’s like I really am high.) Then after about a year of being a head coach I decided to hone in the services my business offers so I said, “I’d like to concentrate on mentoring.” Soon after that statement, I found myself back in a classroom teaching a reading intervention course, Language Arts and A.V.I.D., a college-bound course for secondary students in the United States that focuses on drawing on individual determination to help kids get to university.

The prayers, most fervent, are often in the breathy utterances. They are heart fueled and felt and they stream forward through the conscious mind and the open mouth. They’re powerful beyond measure and the God who hears those prayers propels you into the thing you’ve been wanting to do. The rub is the vehicle, the package, the casing, the housing, the apparatus… You saw it worked out in a different place, a different way. Drowning is terribly unnecessary so much of the time and yet we choose it because the story the preacher told was just so “fable”ous.