Today at work, I interviewed a resident volunteer who would like to be a part of our new blog, but has trouble writing.  I savored the exercise of trying to capture his voice and string together words in such a way that he would feel as if he wrote it, not I, when all is said and done.  I am pleased with the first draft.

I am more pleased, however, with the interview, for it brought an unexpected moment which took me outside everything else if but briefly.

You see, he nearly died in a car accident 11 years ago.  He survived, but was left with the horrible aftermath of traumatic brain injury.  As we were talking, his answer to why he could not keep a job surprised me.  I felt sure it would the physical.  For one, he has to wear a brace on his ankle full-time because the signals from his brain to that ankle no longer work.  But his answer was mental.  Not stress, but being misunderstood and finding himself in conflict without ever really knowing why.

In interviews, he would tell the prospective boss about his brain injury and that he needed people to understand that he was slower, did things differently, and was sometimes confused.  What he tried to say oft came out differently than he intended but did not know that was so.  For a while, at each job, people would accommodating.  Soon, however, because he looked "fine" on the outside, they expected him to act the same as everyone else.  He is not.

I almost laughed out loud for the sweet fellowship of that moment.  Instead, I told him that very morning my boss had called and asked a question I was not expecting.  I couldn't answer it.  No matter how hard I tried to get the words out, I could not.  I grew more and more frustrated as she grew more and more impatient with me until I finally blurted out, "I'm doing what's on the list!"

After she hung up the phone, I received three irate emails about being sarcastic.  I was NOT being sarcastic.  I could not tell her what I was working on at the moment if my very life depended on it.  I could not access that information, nor could I think of a way to describe it to her.

He started crying.  A grown man.  A stranger.  He started crying because never had he heard from another person that she, too, understood being trapped inside yourself, watching things happen you are helpless to prevent...being misunderstood and misperceived no matter how hard you try to explain what is real and what is the injury.

Oh, how I wish I had a great big ugly misshapen head.  That way, people around me would remember that while I do not have a traumatic brain injury, I have a disease that functions much the same way. That way I might have the human grace I need to bear this cross.

The morning was horrible, but the afternoon was worse.  I learned that I made a mistake yesterday that could cost our organization $20,000.  In short, I failed to put a second copy of the grant proposal in the package to the grantmaker.  Such is enough to be disqualified.  We have been funded each time we have applied to this particular grantmaker, and I jeopardized that.  I overnighted a second copy this evening, but I have no clue if it will be accepted or not.  The application guidelines indicate there are no exceptions for failing to follow directions.

To make matters worse, when my boss told me, I grew so angry I swiped up a white-out tape ribbon and threw it across my office.  She was horrified and upset by my action.  I HATE WHAT I AM BECOMING!

I hate what I am becoming and I hate that I am alone in such and I hate that when I trying to explain I am rebuffed or dismissed or belittled.  Oh, we all forget sometimes.

I could have joined him in tears, but I did not.  I savored the moment, though, of giving someone comfort in the very area that frightens and frustrates me as well. 

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I really do not know what to do with Kleinig.  All that waiting and anticipation and I am not sure what to do.

The devastation of sin is most evident in the difficulty that we have with prayer.  Since God has created us and sustains us day by day in our journey here on earth, we are dependent on Him for everything, even life itself.  Every moment we receive everything, in the physical and spiritual realm, from His hands.  What's more, in the first two commandments of the Decalogue He give us His name and its use by us in prayer.  Prayer, then, should come as easily and naturally to us as breathing or eating.  Yet, we all know how hard it is to pray.  Prayer, mostly, seems to go against the grain.  Unless we are quite desperate and have reached the end of our rope, we would rather not ask God for help; we prefer to manage by ourselves, even though as Christians we know this is not possible.

We know that we should pray.  We would like to pray more regularly, ardently, and spontaneously.  The harder we try, the more we seem to fail.  But that's how it's meant to be.  Christ let us fail when we pray by ourselves so that we rely on His intercession for us.  Oddly, our success in prayer comes form our personal failure and our willingness to carry on as He works for us and with us. (156-157)

SIGH.

Why in the world does this seem so strange to me????

If you have read even one entry here, you know I am no "spiritual dynamo," to use Kleinig's term from yesterday's quote.  Not at all.  In fact, you could rightly claim you never knew a weaker Christian.  Here I have been given the most precious gift of all, pure teaching, solid doctrine, and I struggle like an aspen leaf clinging to a tree in the fall.  I am sure the inevitable is coming and I shall be torn from the branch.  Great gusts are buffeting me about and I see nothing but death before me at times.  What faith is there in that?

Yet there are things I know to be true, things I knew to be true before I ever read the Augsburg Confession.  And then there are the most wondrous things I have learned from Luther and Pastor, namely the marvelous mercy of objective grace and the gifts of Christ in baptism (I am baptized) and in the sweet, sweet blessing of His body and blood in the Lord's Supper.  

I have a dear, dear friend who is trying to give me what I crave even though she does not join in the Lutheran confession.  When bewailing my mistake over the phone while we were playing Scrabble (I channeled my anger and frustration into beating the pants off her) and growing ever more upset, Bettina began typing "You are forgiven." into the chat window of the program we were using to play each other online.  You are forgiven.  You are forgiven. You are forgiven.  You are forgiven.  Always.

She also prayed with me.  I tried to reach Pastor.  I really, really wanted him to at least pray for me.  But he was busy.  So after we had hung up and then she had called back to tell me about the snow at her house and then we hung up again, I called her back and asked her if we could pray the new prayer I found (Saturday, January 16th entry).  I thought, perhaps, we could do so with her husband, but it ended up just being the two of us.  I asked her to be the first voice, so that I could be the second, the one to repeat over and over and over again: Lord, have mercy upon me, a sinner. 

Yes, I do not pray for myself really.  I do not because my greatest struggle is reconciling my experience with what I know to be true, is believing that the good things God has for me are not merely for when He takes me to His throne in heaven.  I know my sin and it is great, how could I even think to ask for help.  And help has rarely been forthcoming so why ask when I know that doing so will not make a difference, that God has "other" lessons for me to learn than those of family, love, forgiveness, belonging...at least not in this world.

Oh, I know it is wrong, but I do cling fiercely to what I will have when I come before my Savior for the last time.  I just simply do not believe all the promises about this life are for me.  Some, perhaps, but not like they are for others.

So, I have received great riches and yet still look to the dross on the side of the road.  I know I am weak and miserable.  I know this.

Yet, as I wrote yesterday, I have never seen prayer as a work, so it is never been something I have failed at or thought negatively about until that Sunday sitting in the pew and hearing something in one of Pastor's answers that fundamentally rocked my world with regard to prayer.  I have anguished over this and have really despaired over how long it has taken us to go through the Large Catechism on the Lord's Prayer, when I know the answers to my questions are not in there, but I also know I need to understand this teaching, to take it within me, before I can get to my answers.  Pastor grows very frustrated with me, at times, in part because of my impatience to learn.  Seven months I have been twisting in the wind with regard to prayer.  I find it rather torturous.

Yet I have never seen prayer as a work, so it has never been a failure as Kleinig describes.  I do not understand that.

From the first moment the Holy Spirit gave me the epiphany of Jesus Christ, I prayed.  I pray all day long, this sort of dialogue with God.  I pray for friends and family, but for strangers, too.  I pray for people I see in the grocery store lines. I pray for the people on the street asking for money.  I pray down the church list.  I pray for Bettina's and G-man's whole family, though even after 12 years I struggle to keep who's who straight.  I pray for the children (and their parents) whom Pastor's Lovely Bride encounters in her job as a pediatric oncology nurse.  I pray for Pastor's professors at grad school, for his other parishioners, for those he encounters simply because he is bound by the white collar.  I pray for Pizza Man's staff and the people who come into his restaurant.  For his sister's business and the incredible outreach she has there in holding Spanish bible studies.  I pray for my old Scripture Memory Partner and her volunteering.  I even pray for my boss (that one is a bit hard).  I pray for my godparents and their children and his job and those he encounters there. I pray for Bootstrap (a fellow Texan) whom I've recently befriended, her husband (a church elder), their son (a pastor), his wife and their children.  I pray for the mailman and even for the people in the ER who frustrate me so.  I pray for my pharmacist and the families in our communities at work and for the HVAC man who always tries to help me when he comes by (this past time, taking pity on my huddled form on the couch miserable with the flu, he emptied my trash and replaced the bag for me).  And, truly, this is the tip of the iceberg of what I pray.

Mostly, I give God a running update on my life, on His world, and set it before Him.  I marvel at the multitude of small ways in which He is at work.  I wonder at the beauty and complexity of His creation.  I thank Him continuously for the precious gift of the Living Word.

So, while I have been worried about Lutheran doctrine on prayer and I segment myself off from the whole act, I do pray.  I savor praying.  I enjoy praying with others.  I can pray for long periods without really noticing the passage of time.  And every darned day I still find myself marveling at what can be gained from praying the Psalter.  Because of this, I often pray a dozen or more Psalms at a time, Oh, this one is good, so I will just continue one.  Oh, and that one, too.  Still, don't forget the other one.  I listen to the 18 psalms Pastor recorded for me and long for more, though he has not done them in a while.  Words are simply not sufficient to describe how I feel about the Psalter, what a gift the Holy Spirit opening my eyes to these prayers has been.

Thus, I do not know prayer as Kleinig is describing.  Am I crazy?  Or is the gift I have in prayer literally that--a gift from God, merely a mystery, an utter conundrum with respect to my poor, miserable, weak faith?

Yes, I have been desperate and at the end of my rope and cried out to God, daring the impropriety of doing so.  But that does not define or restrict my prayer.  For I have always known, from the beginning, that I had Christ as my high priest and the Holy Spirit as my intercessor.  With those two flanking me, how could I go wrong?

I may struggle mightily to pray for myself, but I do reach other to others to pray for me, essentially borrowing their voices, their lips, their words when I cannot speak myself.

Perhaps this is why I revel in praying the Psalter so very much, so very deeply.  For there, God has given me words to pray for myself in such a way that I can speak them myself.

So, where do I fit in with Kleinig?


Lord, I believe.  Help my unbelief!