We had family friends over for thanksgiving. The dad of this family is kind of like our church's philosopher in residence, and he has a wife and four kids. My mom and and his wife are in a prayer group with a few other women from the church. Her name is Mary Ellen.
Two of Mary Ellen's four kids weren't home for thanksgiving. One of the absentees lives in Oregon and works at his uncle's organic farm, and the other lives in a commune in New Mexico with her boyfriend. She comes home sporadically, but she never stays for long. She's a year younger than me.
Mary Ellen and I were getting things ready in the kitchen when she saw a verse that my mom wrote on a piece of scrap paper and taped on the fridge.
"I love that verse!" she said. "I think of it like this - I will not be shaay-ay-ay-ay-ken!" she sings while performing a toned-down version of a shimmy.
Later that day, as in, after I went to bed and was reading The Hunger Games, the power went out. I sat there in the dark, terrified. Someone had cut the power. Someone who wanted to kill me and my family, but mostly me. Soon, I would sense his presence in the corner of my room. He would be brandishing a machete, rusty and already stained with the blood of my mother or one of my brothers.
I started to pray. And then I stopped myself. I couldn't do that! It wasn't going to work - I hadn't done enough for it to work. I sat, curled and tense, on my bed. And then I called my mom.
She sounded almost asleep, but she told me she would come down to the basement with a flashlight. She would come downstairs to give a source of light to her twenty-year-old daughter. This daughter had told her that day that sleeping in the basement was never scary. Well, everybody lies, right?
The power came back on an hour later. I promptly turned off my lamp and went to sleep. This morning, I thought about my prayer. And how I think prayer works only if you put enough oomph into it - it gains significance in the sight of God if you back it up with daily devotions, or good deeds, or healthy relationships or good grades or a good track record or an existence that 1. makes sense and 2. has some sort of net positive impact on the world.
I don't trust God to stay unless I do all the right things.
And I decide what those things are.
And my standards for myself are impossibly high.
And something inside me enjoys berating myself for my failures.
And so I think that God does, too.
Because, in the end, I want God to operate the way I think He operates. Because, in the very very end, I want to be Him.
