Making plans, praying prayers, and throwing your life up in the air

Or, "I am out with lanterns looking for myself," as Dickinson humorously noted

I wonder how God handles the prayers of a child, all the fanciful requests mixed in with grandpa’s cancer and the dog’s limp. Kids aren’t supposed to know how hard life is or how scary cancer is, but they catch wind of it and they add the hard stuff to the softness of their imaginative asks. Please heal grandpa’s cancer and help my dog to stop limping and please make my brother be nice to me. And please can it rain candy tomorrow? Amen.

We’re supposed to teach kids that God loves them and hears their prayers, that He wants a relationship with them. God is all powerful and in control. He wants to give good gifts to His children. But we’re also supposed to balance that with some kind of theology that doesn’t make God into a genie in a bottle. We can’t let them believe God will grant every wish, so we tell them He knows best and sometimes what’s best for us is to not get what we ask for and God, You know I hate that. Children will pray prayers that do not get answered the way they want, or the way we want. They will pray bluntly and our adult hearts will feel a pang—we wish we could pray that boldly; we hope God will answer their prayers; please God don’t let them lose faith if You don’t answer the way they want. 

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In February I was surprised to see the daffodils in bloom. We live in a valley in the mountains and our seasons are always a little behind the elevations below us. When I notice the green spires of spring poking up on my drive down the mountain, I know our daffodils at home will be along in a couple more weeks. Next will be the flag irises, waving their purple hellos from the roadside, and then the tiny pink bells blooming on the manzanita along the trails I walk. But every spring I’m surprised by their arrival, as if winter could last forever, as if I would just get used to snow and gray and cold. Spring keeps coming around.

We’ve sold our home and we’ll be moving in the summer, so I won’t be putting any plants or seeds in the ground this year. I know I’ll be too busy purging and packing up thirteen years of living to think about the yard or the garden. We covered the raised beds in straw in the winter, tucking them in nicely, weed-free and ready for a new generation of caretakers. I will make sure they know how the ground isn’t usually ready for planting until after Mother’s Day each year. I’ll tell them how most of the things I have planted in the past have been the largest greenhouse transplants I can find, but zinnias and snow peas always go in as seeds. Over the years there have been experimental plantings of things like squash and hot peppers seeds, harvested at our dinner table. Our kids took part in the mystery of dead things buried and resurrected here, of putting something to rest in the dark and waiting to see it anew in the light. 

But this year we won’t plant anything and in late summer, when we move, it’s possible the volunteer tomatoes and the overwintered chard will be producing, but that’s it. Untended things, leftover from the previous year’s work. 

Actually, I remember now that I left my dahlias in the ground. They’ll be just starting to produce when we say goodbye. I’m not sure if I’m happy or sad about this yet…

As of right now, we don’t know exactly where we’ll be moving, but we know we’re leaving this home and property in good hands and we want it to be prepared for them. We have thrown our lives up in the air and expect God to settle us where He wants, but so far it’s been nothing but changed plans and hope deferred. I only know that late summer and fall need to be kept as simple as possible, and there is a lot of painting and polishing to do but our time of planting here is done¹.

I’ve waited for answers to prayer that didn’t come, but I’ve also received answers that I forgot I had prayed for. Things have slipped by or sprung up unnoticed, and that’s a terrible and surprising thing—to pray a prayer and not watch for it.

It’s mysterious to send words out into the void and wait for a response. It takes imagination to come up with new ways to say the same things, to make the same requests day after day without rationalizing. Children specialize in this kind of mystery, and I suppose childhood starts to end when we stop expecting life to be an enigma. Adults have explanations. 

I have come back to mystery as my explanation because the explanations have come back cold and heartless. I think (hope) those prayers that I claim are “unanswered" are really just secret gardens I haven't found the gate to yet, because God is not deaf or mute and even my fanciful requests have been heard. Even the one-time prayers have found a place.

The garden is nothing but mystery and imagination; prayer is the garden not just the seeds; the seeds are imagination, believing that you can put something dead in the ground any which way and the mystery of geotropism will cause the root to grow down and the shoot to push up, through the darkness, into the light of day, no matter if you had all the right words and the big faith and you shouted, shouted, shouted; or cried. No matter. You can whisper. You can imagine it in your heart. You can’t do it wrong. 

Prayer is the garden, not just the seeds. It is transplanted hopes, half grown. It’s a whole life of things remembered by God. You plant according to the soil and the climate, and those things can change, but it all works together—the prayer, the life, the answers, the hope. The soil, the seed, the surrounding plants, the weather.

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“Everything is yours, and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God.”²

What does Paul mean. It’s beautiful and I don’t understand it, and it feels right to end my question with a period. I am content with mystery; except when I want answers. I am content with Presence; Lord, help my discontent. These are the nesting dolls of this imaginative reality we live in, no matter how many explanations we offer: Everything is yours and you belong to Christ and Christ belongs to God.

And then his next sentence: “A person should think of us in this way: as servants of Christ and managers of the mysteries of God.” Paul stewards a mystery, he doesn’t solve it. 

I want prayer to solve things but God is not my genie. Instead there is a garden of the forgottens that will one day surprise me, of transplants that didn’t survive but became compost, seeds that sprouted but didn’t produce, and tall, flourishing beauties I didn’t work for.

Meanwhile, I am waiting for my own transplanting, and “I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.”³

View of Schmiedebergerkamm (that looks very much like Camas Valley), by Caspar David Friedrich

1. I don’t actually know any of this, I’m realizing. Solid plans can turn to mush overnight so I’m holding everything loosely. We plan to move this summer. That’s it.

2. 1 Corinthians 3:22-23, CSB

3. Emily Dickinson wrote this in a letter to a friend, describing her state after her family’s move. It feels humorously accurate to me, as we wait to see where we will land:

I cannot tell you how we moved. I had rather not remember. I believe my "effects" were brought in a bandbox, and the "deathless me," on foot, not many moments after. I took at the time a memorandum of my several senses, and also of my hat and coat, and my best shoes—but it was lost in the melee, and I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.

Such wits as I reserved, are so badly shattered that repair is useless—and still I can't help laughing at my own catastrophe. I supposed we were going to make a "transit," as heavenly bodies did—but we came budget by budget, as our fellows do, till we fulfilled the pantomime contained in the word "moved." It is a kind of gone-to-Kansas feeling, and if I sat in a long wagon, with my family tied behind, I should suppose without doubt I was a party of emigrants!

They say that "home is where the heart is." I think it is where the house is, and the adjacent buildings.