I heard a story once...

I heard a story a while ago now, back when I was in college, given by a pastor during his weekly Sunday sermon. I forget now the main topic of the sermon, but the story was memorable. He began his sermon by talking about how, when he and his wife were much younger, they were in some financial difficulty and were having trouble staying afloat from month to month.

One particular month, it was particular stressful for them and they needed something on the order of $2,000 like, immediately, or they would be in serious trouble. The pastor then relayed how hard it was to pray for help from God, because it seemed that to ask for something so material, so direct and so... financial, was a bit like testing God and asking for a miracle. Well, they prayed anyway. In the morning, when he got up and checked the mail, inside the mailbox was a letter that contained a check for $2,000. He had been due the check (Again, I forget now whether someone had borrowed the money from the pastor or whether it was a rebate, or whatever) for some time now, and both the pastor and his wife had forgotten about it completely. The pastor went on to talk about prayer and so on.

It is freaky sort of, but I have a lot of freaky "maybe this is a coincidence but maybe it is God" stories with respect to this particular pastor. Another post, another time I guess.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up is because I never did take much stock in stories like this. Of course, I never had any doubts that the Pastor John was telling the truth. I am just about 100% certain that it happened exactly as Pastor John told the story. But I never took much stock in it, because nothing like that happens to people like me. I've heard of things happening to other people, and I've SEEN (been witness to) things happening to other people, but not much happens to me.

I remember when I was a kid, for like 5 years straight, I prayed to God (or maybe it was Santa) that I would get a red and white remote controlled gas-powered airplane that I could take outside and fly around. And some years for Christmas and my birthday, I would get a sweater and corduroys, and other years I would get shoes and gloves, etc. My interests having changed since those years, I am still, today, without that red and white remote control airplane.

Of course, many would dispute the comparison between a struggling pastor praying for $2,000 and a greedy silly kid praying for a toy airplane, at least from God's point of view. But, it isn't God's point of view that I am talking about right now. It is the prayer person's point of view.

We all pray for stupid things, and sometimes we pray for important things. Sometimes, we pray for things that aren't stupid but aren't necessarily that important either - "God, please help me get a parking space closer to the elevator so I don't have to pass that guy who smells who always tries to make conversation with me." But regardless of what we pray for, we do try to keep track of our "win-loss" record and see if we can't make any generalizations.

But every now and then something happens that makes you think twice about the nature of the relationship between you and God.

A few weeks ago, I was in pretty dire straits at work. I had screwed up an assignment quite a bit, but the partner didn't give me back my work with his corrections. Instead, he told me to print out a fresh copy of what I had done, and then correct it myself to see what mistakes I had made. I loathe this kind of teaching method.

1. If I knew what the partner knew, I wouldn't be an associate doing ambiguous and difficult assignments without the big picture, and without full knowledge of how to do whatever it is that I am supposed to be doing.

2. If I knew what mistakes I made, and how to fix them, I would have corrected them before I handed in the assignment to my partner.

3. Asking me to go back and revisit my work without telling me what I did wrong, and how to correct whatever it was that I did wrong, is like telling a kid who just cleaned his room to go back, saying "fix it, I'll be up in 2 hours to check to see if you did." And the kid is thinking, "fix WHAT??!"

And yet, there I was, heading back to my office. I re-printed out my assignment, and of course I had no idea what to do. The main reason, apparently, that my partner had asked for me to be his associate was because of his belief in my ability to think quickly and correctly. I was about to prove him wrong. Panic was building; the one person who could help me, was deliberately testing me to see if I knew what I clearly didn't know.

I turned to the one person I could - my wife. And she did what she could do, which was to pray and ask me to do the same. And so, in the middle of the work day, both of us in different places just closed our eyes and prayed for help.

Not five minutes later, a senior associate, Joe, who had been on vacation for the past 8 business days popped his head into my office to say that he was back, and seeing the look on my face, he sat down across from me and asked, "Got something back, but he didn't tell you what was wrong?" Over the next hour, Joe sat down with me and went line by line over my assignment, giving me the knowledge I needed to correct what I did wrong. I finished making the corrections on my own, armed with the knowledge I needed to do the assignment correctly.

Joe wasn't supposed to come back until Monday, but he came back early anyway, just to see what was up. He came back early even though he lives in Long Island with his family and the commute is one of the worst you can imagine.

Now, this may seem to be rather trivial to some of you, but the magnitude of this small miracle cannot be understated. I firmly believe that that assignment, as given to me to correct by the managing partner of my law firm, was a test I needed to pass in order to stay at the law firm. And in this economy, at this stage of my career and life, and at this time in my family's life, there was no more important assignment to get right. That night, leaving the office, I was filled with such relief and emotion that I had to chill a bit before driving home.

Anyway, if that don't beat the red and white remote controlled airplane, I don't know what can.

-David