Unreasonable Joy

The snow started falling at 3:00 pm on Saturday.  A smattering of flakes became a swirling mess.  By the time I woke up at 6:00 am on Sunday, Long Island had been pummeled with 18 inches of snow.  After cancelling church services (definitely the most powerful executive decision I get to make as the Senior Pastor – and I’ve used these executive powers twice in 22 years), I started shoveling our 40 foot long driveway.

The snow was compliant – soft, fluffy, light – until I walked up the street.  Somehow and for some reason the plow had dumped 90% of the wet, heavy, street-chunks onto the odd side of the road.  My side!  My neighbors on the even side of Ingrid Road got off easy.  I couldn’t believe it.  It seemed like yet another vicious example of Oddism, mistreating people based on their street address.  Seriously, I was outraged.  Breaking up and hauling away the chunks took me over an hour.  Afterwards, I went inside, made a huge ham and cheese omelet, built a roaring fire and read some great short stories, but my back still hurt from all the shoveling.

A few hours later I opened my email and read a desperate plea for prayer from my friend Dr. Joe Harvey.  Joe runs a Christian hospital in the Congo, where things are quickly descending into a hell-hole of violence, warfare, and disease (including a Swine Flu epidemic).

Since October over 77,000 refugees have flooded across the Oubangui River into Joe’s region.  Half of his patients desperately need nutritional support and most of them can’t pay.  On Tuesday Joe’s staff had to hide two wounded rebel soldiers from a mob of local vigilantes.  “God knows if things are about to turn around,” Joe concluded, “or descend into complete chaos, but I believe He wants us to be prepared either way.”

Joe put my life in perspective.  Sometimes the things that irk me are utterly ridiculous: an inconvenient snowfall, perceived slights and injustices, a mildly sore back.  And at times my lack of gratitude – for ham and cheese omelets, fresh-fallen snow on evergreen trees, the smell of burning oak logs, a warm and safe house, good books and stories – seems equally ludicrous.

In his typical adolescent sarcasm, my 16 year old son sometimes says, “Gee, dad, that’s too bad.  Why don’t you call the Waaambulance?”  He’s got a point.  Self-pity, resentment and ingratitude can from an emotional Bermuda Triangle, sucking me into a vortex of unhappiness.  Fortunately, simple biblical/spiritual practices – giving thanks to God, receiving the Eucharist, praying for others (like Dr. Joe Harvey), listening to the lonely, serving the poor – not only connect me to Jesus and help others, they also warm my heart with the wine of God’s unreasonable joy.

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Prayer as Desperation

True prayer, isn’t mere private piety; it changes us and it changes the world around us.  As a community, when we learn to cry out to God, it trains our hearts and ears to listen for the outcries around us.  Desperate, messy, ragged people (the Bartimaeus people of the world) no longer shock us or repulse us because we know what it’s like to be in need.  We know how to cry out for help.  And as a result, God softens our heart towards others, especially the poor, the abused and the oppressed.  As we pray, we learn to pay attention to this quiet suffering as well.

My friend Saul loves to tell the story that propelled him to his ministry with the poorest of the poor in Mexico City (see Armonia Ministries).  Although he grew up in Mexico, he had never seen the desperate poverty on the edge of the city.  But one calm Sunday afternoon an acquaintance drove him up a winding hill that overlooked a massive dump.  This enormous, man-made crater contained tons of garbage.  A dark brown river of raw sewage gurgled through the piles of garbage.  As he gazed into the bottom of the pit, Saul realized that there were actually people scurrying around on the steep slopes that dropped into the dump.  By scavenging for food and scraps of junk to sell, they tried to eke out a living in the shacks built on the edge of the dump.

Initially, Saul was stunned and outraged.  He muttered, “Human beings should not live like this!  This is a crime and something must be done.”  As turned from staring into the dump, still fuming and muttering, he noticed a small boy only a few yards away.  The boy was digging into a mound of garbage at the top of the hill.   that descended into the dump.  After a frantic search, the boy pulled out a few scraps of a wilted, dirt-covered orange peel, sat down on the pile of garbage and proceeded to devour his “meal.”  Saul’s heart broke with compassion.  For the next twenty years (and it’s still going) Saul and his wife Pilar would dedicate their lives to working among the desperately poor in Mexico City and Oaxaca.

Prayer as desperation does that to us.  It changes our hearts.  It trains us to see, to smell, to hear un-decent, broken, poor, crying-out people around us. We can’t ignore them anymore.  We can’t hide from them anymore. For the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ hears the cries of the afflicted and the desperate. If we come to God, he will tune our ears to the cries of the world around us.

(Adapted from The Folly of Prayer)

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