for when things are not okay anymore

the monthly letter

As I write this morning, Nate just flew across the country to meet with his college roommates. They packed their favorite books to share, and though 45 year-old bodies don’t work as they did twenty years ago, I imagine they’ll find their way into old wrestling matches and boyish athletic competitions in between catching up on life stories and prayers.

Back home, Charlotte rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and asked to be held most of the morning. I put her down to wash dishes or change the laundry, and she followed me like a shadow, “hold me please, hold me please.”

Nate normally does the morning routine with our littlest ones. He brushes their teeth and gets them dressed, and he fixes them breakfast. Their day is anchored in Daddy. When he leaves, life feels a little off kilter.

I once might have called her, in a moment like this, “whiny” or sleep-deprived — but the patterns become more evident as our children grow: their connection to us is the strength for their day. Nate and I are their assurance. They move out from our morning cuddles and “Mommy-look-at-this” into the world in a confidence that can also be easily threatened when the tether isn’t home. We are home to them.

The gift of Nate and I straddling two different childhood worlds — high school graduations and potty training — is that we see cause and effect even within a single day. When our big kids are receiving home as it is intended to be — the place they are known, the place they can fall apart and be received, the place they are accepted as they are — the world away from our porch feels less scary, more secure. Watching them has made me less concerned about what we (parents and the little tikes) might be missing when our morning plan is hijacked for a cuddle … to hold a little longer, to read another picture book in my lap.

This seemingly-wasted time is of the utmost importance to shaping a heart and a life.

And it’s not all that different with us.

I push past my limits for a ministry cause or a writing endeavor, or even an attempt at being super-mom — always present, always making it happen for my kids — and there’s a story behind that push: I entered the world (that day or that month or that set of years) from a place of insecurity. I pushed past the whiny morning and added another activity to distract my whiny heart, and I missed what I needed most: wasting time behind held by God.

This notion of being held is the starting point for raw connection with God. It’s the bedrock of a real prayer life.

But prayer is this funny thing. We can enhance it through discipline. We can practice fresh ways to approach it. We can add more of it to the pockets of our life. But the real impact comes when we start to see how nothing else in the world quite works as it should without it. We grow most in prayer when we’re desperate. Desperation outruns discipline.

Many of us are in that place but we maybe don’t know it. We’re experiencing the beginnings of desperation, but we haven’t named it or known what to call it. Things are not okay anymore — we feel whiny, a bit untethered, and as if some of the things we took for granted as always working aren’t working as they should.

The gift of the little fires I see happening with friends all across the country, and many of you I hear from around the world, is that it seems there’s a theme. So many of us are rubbing the sleep out of our eyes, like Charlotte, waking up to a day without Dad and not quite sure what it looks like to arrest the plans and be held.

Prayer as a discipline is incredible life-scaffolding. Prayer as a habit makes for rhythmic days. But prayer from the nothing-is-going-to-work-today-as-it-should place is what changes a life … what sends us out, into the insecure world, in security.

Friends, we’re 37 and 44 and 62, many of us needing to be two years old again. Instead of scolding our whiny little hearts into action, we need to be attentive to them. We need a cuddle—lots of cuddles. Prayer is the continual assurance that we’re safe, even if the world around us isn’t. It’s the live-action reminder that being held is essential for a life of strength and surety in God.

And yet prayer is often the most overlooked or (to the reverse) over-disciplined part of our life in God.

Can we make it that simple again and let ourselves be the little children who need circle-scratches on our back, whispers in our ear, and our hair tousled … all out of affection and nearness? This … this … is prayer. A day of prayer is a day of constant reassurances — you are not alone in your fear …

I see you …

I like you…

I’ve got this for you.

Let’s not outgrow ourselves: we need this.

And maybe some of us need, first, to name that whiny, out-of-sorts, itching-for-something-more feeling we’ve had.

It’s the beginnings of desperation.

Our flesh that has been pacified by activity and productivity and false security in our accomplishments feels squirrely at the signs of it, but our heart was made for it.

You were made to be like Charlotte — knotted, fuzzy hair, sleep still stuck to your eyelashes, and yet facing a day that just won’t work well without Dad, without being held, without an anchor.

The end of your daily security can make for the beginnings of a deep life of prayer. It’s not too late to name the source of your whining and welcome desperation.

Because the desperate are the ones who get to see the face of God.

{For more writing on topics like this … well, writing that’s even a bit more candid and frequent … check out the group of us over here on my more-private writing space.}

Until next month,

Sara