Our First Prayer

I think life is about finding words. I think that we walk down the paths that we do in the hopes of finding and collecting words and fragments of phrases that will help us articulate our existence. When we are born, we are speechless save for the initial cry of commencement. Vulnerable, rebellious and blurry, I believe it is our first instinctual cry for God and it is all we know to do emerging from our red darkness. We hadn't yet known any other saving touch except for the hands of our Father who formed us in the depths of the earth and knit our hearts together with love and promise. 

And then we quickly were silenced and hushed with pacifiers of promises and soothing whispers from figures unknown. "There, there... Don't cry... No more tears..." And from that moment on, we are trained to believe that crying is associated with "wrongness" and tears are highly unfavorable and so our natural inclination to cry for help, or at all for that matter, is waned away. When we fall off our bikes and scrape our knees, we are taught to hold back our tears and muster our courage. Don't you dare cry in public, you'll make a scene. You really shouldn't cry over relationships or people- it's a sign of weakness. You certainly can't cry if you are a man but if you must, you must not cry openly.  

But this whole time, I think we began to lose a vital element of our experience. We started losing our ability to signal our distress and the God who heard our first cries is relegated to a mere assistant and not our sole Savior. And so pride convinced us that we cannot adequately communicate with God unless we found the perfectly fitting phrases to articulate our plea. So we walk through life collecting words in our pockets like treasures forgetting that our first prayer was only just a cry.  

Up in the Air

None of this is actually normal. I was sitting by a lanky, perspiring middle-aged man on a plane to Denver and the only thing I could think was that none of this had any ounce of normalcy to it. He was wearing khaki shorts with a striped golf tee and white Pumas with blue laces and no socks. He wouldn’t (or couldn’t) look at me. Not for one second did he see my face or acknowledge that he was 14 inches away from a human that had a heart that beat at 70 beats per second or that we were travelling in the sky at 600 miles per hour in a machine that ascended 10,000 ft in the air. He ordered an undisclosed alcoholic beverage that he poured over a cup of ice and sipped absentmindedly. He sniffled the entire 3 hour and 45 minute duration of the flight while simultaneously staring at the screen in front of him that played nothing but animated clouds drifting through the Frontier logo. And I knew that one time he had such big dreams of outer space and deep ocean water and maybe when he was still a boy, he had imagined with his creative power entire worlds to explore with fresh wonder. I just knew that one time he used to stay up late talking to someone he had given his heart to before he knew anything about return policies or fractured pieces, and perhaps he had a brush of something like love and what did it feel like? Divinity?

I knew that he had seen a bleeding sunset before that made him question the idea of an ultimate Creator because the world was beautiful and is beauty still art even if it’s accidental? Was God an artist and was he an atheist? He had cried before till his whole body shook from exhaustion- maybe not in the last year or even the last ten but I knew he had had, at one point in his living, shed every tear his eyes could afford. He had been broken by disappointment and bruised by mistakes and I knew that when he went to sleep at night, he wondered if there was anything more to life that had possibly been hidden from him in some sick and mysterious cosmic hide-and-seek game of purpose. But maybe it wasn’t hide and seek, maybe he had found it but it always was a game of tag and he never was fast enough to catch it. Like I said, none of this is actually normal. Because we are spinning 1,000 miles per hour, traveling around a Sun that is 93 million miles away and there are 7 billion heartbeats on this planet with a new cadent addition added every day to the chorus of our drum line and it isn’t normal.

Why do we fight so hard to keep the confines of our “ordinary” in tact when this life is anything but common? Miracles are born every second and in every moment there is the flutter of angels wings.

I was tempted to hit him on the head, just so he would notice that I was human and that I could, in fact, move the extremities of my body with the sparkle of a thought, electric impulses of neuron and nerve.

It wasn’t until I stood up to exit my seat and pass him that he looked me straight in the eyes and motioned with his hand for me to go before him. His smile was like the sunlight passing through the trees on an afternoon drive- a transient flicker.

And his eyes were blue.