Good for Your Prayer Life

November twenty-sixth.  Eight-forty p.m.  It's been two days since I rousted our mated pair of white plywood deer from the far corner shelf in our musty basement and assigned them their place to stand--rain, snow or shine--for the next month.  I gave their red ribbons a cursory fluff and even took a few moments to contemplate their placement, so as to give as good an illusion of reality as can be had from wildlife made of pressed veneer.  The one thing I didn't do at that moment was to secure them to anything. And so naturally, by Sunday morning (when I was laid-up with an intestinal inconvenience of the sort commonly associated with budget Mexican resorts), the wind had toppled the deer onto their sides, giving not the desired illusion of wintry natural bliss, but the appearance of a government herd-thinning program on our front lawn, the effect of slaughter only enhanced by the sprays of red nicely aligned with their hypothetical carotid arteries.

And so, having finished dinner and watched "Jeopardy!"  (I was watching "Jeopardy!" in the 70's, long before "Jeopardy!" was cool, and I'm certainly not going to miss it now that it commands a certain level of respect around the company water cooler.  (When co-workers regale each other with stories of the latest viral quotes from "Duck Dynasty" (which I also watch) or "Jersey Shore" (which I only vaguely know exists and wouldn't watch just based on the hearsay comments I've heard), I whip out the trump-card:  "Well, I wouldn't know--we watch "Jeopardy!" during that time."  (I don't know if it actually carries the intellectual weight I wishfully think, but at least it isn't "Jersey Shore!"), I went out to address the issue of the fallen deer.  It wasn't particularly cold out, so I was attired (rather nattily, if I do say so myself) in cotton pajama pants, a short-sleeved tee shirt and sandals.  I carefully selected a few sticks of scrap lumber from my bucket of culls and whittled them into stakes under the glow of the carport light.  Then, stakes, wire and mallet in hand, I headed out to the side yard to stake the deer.

Since I had my iPhone in my pocket, i decided the flashlight feature would be plenty bright for installing a few stakes.  I tried kneeling but my knees quickly rebelled, due to the large crop of red oak acorns in the front yard; so there I was, sitting on my backside in the cool grass in my pajama pants, hammering stakes into the ground and wiring the deer's legs to them by the light of the cell phone.  It wasn't quite a Norman Rockwell tableau, but it was pleasantly warm and I didn't really mind the task, so was humming "Silent Night" and hammering away...until I scooted to reach the final stake.

Having "scootched" (that's a word in every Southerner's dictionary that you'll never find beyond the Mason-Dixon) to the fourth and final stake, I raised my three pound sledge hammer to drive the wooden anchor deeper into the soil.  That's when it hit me--not the mallet, but a realization:  as I reached for the stake, it suddenly dawned on me that I was sitting in a depression.  And let me assure you, it was not yet the middle of the next heartbeat before it occurred to me what might dwell in that depression!

A few yards away, under the other large oak tree in our yard, I had waged war on a nest of wasps for the better part of three months.  They seemingly thrived on a steady diet of gasoline, insecticide, hot water and everything else we threw down their burrow, whose opening was the size of a one-quart Duke's mayonnaise jar.  I shuddered at the thought.

If you need something to improve your focus on prayer, you could do worse that sitting astraddle a hole in the ground, wearing thin cotton pants, wondering whether a million yellow-jacketed, dagger-wielding demons of hell are plotting an invasion of your posterior regions!

Fortunately, the stings never came.  I got the last stake in place (quickly!) and vacated the premises, proudly reporting to my Beloved that I had accomplished the task at hand and that there would be no further reindeer carnage on my watch.  I got lucky.  But what if?  The truth is, this world is full of perils--many we see and many more we never do.  God's grace protects us from most.  Those we must endure, God uses to grow us.  No experience, pleasant or painful, happy or sad, is ever wasted in God's economy.  Rather, God bids us come to Him in prayer, trusting Him with our every need.  Fears, struggles and failures are given us so that we can offer them back to God.  And in bringing them to Him, we learn to know His goodness like the backs of our hands.  Then, in the instantaneous flash of a car crash or a heart attack--or a suspected wasp nest--we don't hesitate to call out to Him.  Instead of having to gather our courage to approach His throne, we already know just how much He loves us, and we shout to Him for rescue.

There are worse things than being stung--but not many in my book.  I've had a couple of nasty allergic reactions to yellowjacket venom, and I certainly don't relish the notion of having anything sting me in such a sensitive anatomic region.  But the beauty of God's love is this:  nothing is too small or too silly for me to bring to Him.  God loves for me to rely on Him, and He rejoices in giving me what I need.

What has been good for your prayer life this week?  If nothing else, give thanks for the disasters that didn't happen!