Prayer

In 2005 I travelled to North Africa for the first time in my life. I went with a group of graduate students and professors from my university, including the lanky sad-eyed boy I was dating at the time. We saw a lot of things on that trip but the one that left the deepest imprints on my heart was a visit we made to a makeshift orphanage in the middle of almost nowhere. About fifty children from age three to sixteen lived behind sandbag and barbwire walls guarded by soldiers weighed down with heavy weaponry. They had been rescued by these soldiers and the half-crazy preacher/commando who lead them when they snatched them from the clutches of Joseph Kony and his sadistic followers. I remember feeling paralyzed with helplessness as we led the group of children in silly songs and games. Every frail body we held had been sexually assaulted. Every pair of eyes we looked into had seen murder. Every limp hand in ours had been forced to do God knows what. I smiled through several hand-waving verses of “Father Abraham” all the while concentrating on not throwing up.

I came back from that trip having suffered no more than a few blisters and some sunburn. But I felt like my heart was carrying someone else’s scars. I remember kneeling to pray in a quiet prayer room somewhere on my Christian university campus. An air-conditioned place with soft lamp light and a small decorative fountain trickling somewhere in the background. And I felt paralyzed again. I had no words. For the first time in my life I felt in the presence of someone less … comfortable, than I had always known him to be. I was broken-hearted and enraged by the small sip of injustice and suffering I had tasted. The emotion that must well up inside the one I worshipped made me tremble. That trip was the catalyst for questions I had never asked before.

I have felt that way again this week.

I’m not entirely sure why. I don’t know if it just a delayed processing of our experiences and those of our friends in North Africa. I don’t know if motherhood is making me soft. I don’t know if praying for the heart of God is happening. And that terrifies me. What a dangerous thing to pray for…

I read the news from around the world, from some places so far away I can hardly imagine them and others frighteningly familiar, and my heart freezes. Syria. Italy. Somalia. The United States. Unspeakable suffering is happening around the world constantly. And if I let myself dwell on it, I just feel completely overwhelmed.

That lanky sad-eyed boy I married took a Trauma Healing training course last week. He received tools for helping people cope with trauma that we hope will be a blessing to many of the refugees we plan to work with soon. A couple nights ago, when I was pouring out my soul to him in the dark, hours after we had turned out the light he mentioned that questioning God’s goodness, God’s trust-worthiness is one of the biggest things people who have been through trauma wrestle with. And when he said that I burst into tears.

I don’t necessarily feel like those are my questions. They are not ones I have a right to. But there are people I love who do. So the questions are closer than they used to be. They are no longer cliché. For reasons I don’t fully understand they are the ones that make me cry.

Sometimes I feel like all I really have is metaphor. It’s how I understand the world. It’s often the only thing that really makes sense to me. It’s also the only thing I feel like I have to describe where I am, what I feel and believe. I told Bryan a couple nights ago that I feel like I am in a dark room, not scary dark, but comforting and safe. In the room is a carved piece of stone that I am holding onto. It is a part of a wall or a column maybe. I have been here in this room for a long time. I know every groove in the rock, every shape it traces under my hands. It is worn smooth from years of my touch. I know it well and I love it. But something has pushed me forward in the dark and as I reach out to steady myself, my hands have brushed against more rock and more carvings. With a thrill of fear and wonder I realize that the stone I have clung to in the dark is only a fraction of all that there is, only a part of a much bigger design. I feel new patterns and texture under my fingertips and I know it stretches on forever. I am realizing that the room is enormous, bigger than I ever dreamed it could be.

That’s where I am right now, gathering the courage to keep moving forward, not just to cling to the beauty I know, but to seek all that it is a part of.