Even now, exactly what I needed

Sometimes, when faced with a large stack of essays to grade, I panic. I feel suddenly overwhelmed, incapable of making it through them, and ultimately unqualified to give these students grades. Always, in that moment, I just need to take a deep breath and plow on and my inadequacies, fictional and real, melt away as I do what I truly believe I was made to do: teach people to write.

Recently, I have begun teaching Faith Formation classes at Holy Trinity. Suddenly I am faced with doing something I have only a tenuous grasp on: understand God, tell the stories of the Bible, and answer the tough questions that children think of before they feel incapable of asking tough questions about God. And each time I teach Godly Play, we open with prayer, we pray before our meal together, and we pray at the close of our session. And right now, I am utterly incapable of standing before them. I don't hold a Master's Degree in Theology in my back pocket and there's no band-aid of belief getting me through right now. After watching my daughter's fervent prayers for a new sibling for ten months now, after receiving prayers from our friends and family, near and far, after quietly saying to myself over and over and over for the past several months for this child I prayed. . . for this child I prayed . . . for this child I prayed. . . Having stood last Monday afternoon, hands balled into fists, and wept I don't understand I don't understand I don't understand, I am incapable of believing that my prayers, my daughters prayers, my friends prayers on my behalf have fallen on listening ears.

Before you worry that I've given up on God, please understand, I've only given up on prayer. And I know it's not permanent. So don't worry. This is like the time Kirsti knocked my tooth out and I vowed never to speak to her again: inspired by pain and ultimately temporary.

There's a point to this, you should know, one made with gratitude and misty-eyed sadness. A friend who has also had a loss asked me this week if I knew anything of religious services held to honor miscarriages. I did - several years ago, David sent me a printout of a service he held for Erika and Darin and packrat that I am, I'd folded it and saved it in my journal, so I pulled it out and in doing so, read exactly what I needed to hear:

Loving God, you hear our intercessions even when we are unable to make them.

I don't have to pray right now. And for that I am grateful. I need to breathe, to feed my family (though my friends, for whom I am utterly grateful, have ensured that this is an easy task), and to heal. And while I do that, I don't need to tackle the issue of prayer. It'll be waiting for me later.