Praying to ourselves

Sitting in the back of the bus surrounded by Southern Baptist Ministers making our way back to Louisville from Washington D.C. which we had failed to save.

Everyone wore three piece suits with their vest unbuttoned to relax except me.

I wore blue jeans, Hushpuppies, a plaid button down, sock tie and corduroy jacket with my feet propped on the seat in front of me trying not to burp.

I sucked down a couple of beers before getting on the bus and didn't want to burp on the fact with my ... peers.

"Let's pray for our country," sighs the Pastor of the Lyndon Baptist Church.

"Why?" I ask covering my mouth.

"So that the Lord will intervene and again use our country to glorify the Lord," he booms.

I burp.

My peers eye me with grave suspicion before bellowing, "WE NEED THE LORD TO INTERVENE!"

"I don't know guys," I say sitting up, "I think he already has."

"We need God to do it again!" they spit demandingly.

"It's hard to do anything twice just as good as the first time," I explain.

Buttoning their vests to go to work on one of their own, the Pastor of the Highland Baptist Church asks, "Just what do you think prayer is?"

"I dunno ... I think it's pretty much us talking to ourselves and hoping God's listening. I think it's pretentious to always be asking for something when God's already given us everything."

A long moment of silence follows before the Pastor of the Beulah Land Bible Baptist Church exclaims "You're not one of us! The Bible proclaims God will deliver unto us everything we need."

"Yeah, yeah," I wave him off, "but not everything we want."

The Pastor of the Colgate Baptist Church ... home of the brightest smiles under Heaven ... starts to pronounce me a pagan and a Heathen but the other stop him as they all move to front seats on the bus.

"What's prayer?" asks Frederick Buechner.  "It's shooting shafts into the dark. What mark they strike, if any, who's to say?"

It's reaching for a hand you cannot touch.

The silence is so fathomless that prayers like plummets vanish in the sea."

You beg.

You whimper.

You load God down with empty praise.

You tell him sins that he already knows full well.

You seek to change his changeless will ...

Yet ... Prayer is the wind that fills {the} sail. Else waves would dash {us} on the rocks, or {we} would drift with witless tides.

And sometimes, by God's grace, a prayer is heard.