Naomi Dathan

Last Sunday in church, we read the following Covenant Prayer as her opening prayer. It’s a great prayer for the new year:

I am no longer my own, but thine. Put me to what thou wilt, rank me with whom thou wilt. Put me to doing, put me to suffering. Let me be employed for thee or laid aside for thee, exalted for thee or brought low for thee.  Let me be full, let me be empty. Let me have all things, let me have no thing. I freely and heartily yield all things to thy pleasure and disposal. And now, O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, thou art mine, and I am thine. So be it. And the covenant which I have made on earth, let it be ratified in heaven. Amen.

I think my pastor said it was written by John Wesley.  Isn’t it a nice sentiment? Isn’t it a lovely prayer to start off the new year?

As long as you don’t listen to the words.

Maybe my skin has gotten a little thin. After all we just spent a month and a half singing Christmas carols – lovely sentimental melodious celebrations of the birth of the precious Christ child. Everything is beautiful, everything is sweet and nice and good and were all going to heaven. This is why we love Christmas, right?

Maybe after all that, the covenant prayer seems a little harsh if you listen too closely to the words. “I am no longer my own, but thine.” We can live with that. We believers do count ourselves as Jesus’ own.

“Put me to what thou wilt, rank me with whom thou wilt.” Gets a little tougher here – this acknowledgment that if we are truly committing ourselves to God, he should get to pick not only our work, but the worldly success that comes from it. If you know me at all, you know that I am ambitious. I’m willing to work hard, I’m willing to educate myself, I’m willing to pay my dues. But in the end, I do expect to see the pay-off for my efforts. I have actually offended people in some writers groups, because I refuse to act as though the process of writing is the goal. That the art is the end. I’m all about art, but to me the writing process isn’t complete until someone reads what is written. The more the better, and if they are willing to pay money to read, even better. Crass, unseemly, but there it is. But last Sunday, in unison with the rest of my congregation, I prayed that God would determine my success not based on my effort but on His will.

Wait, it gets worse.

“Put me to doing, put me to suffering.” I really did pray that. Did I mean it? You probably know, 2011 was a tough year for my family. But I just invited God to put me to more suffering, according to His will, regardless of the fact that I think I deserve a break. I think I’ve been pretty brave. I don’t want to suffer anymore. I said the prayer. Did I mean it?

Skipping ahead a little, “Let me have all things, let me have no thing.” I want everything. I hate feeling deprived. I will stop just short of actually saying those ugly words, “I just want what’s coming to me.”

Although, in one sense, maybe in the most real sense, that is exactly what that prayer says. “I just want what’s coming to me.”

I’ll be happy to recite all of my good qualities for you again (see all my other blogs). It’s comfortable to defend myself, to defend my life. “I work hard.” “I’m a pretty good person.” “Haven’t I been through enough?”

If I want my walk as a Christian to be authentic, I have to again and again return to the reality that I want to flee from: the only good in me comes from God. I deserve nothing, have earned nothing. I was born by grace, I live by grace, and one day, when I die, I will be utterly dependent upon grace for eternity.

In summary then, the covenant prayer from last Sunday makes me super uncomfortable. I want to dismiss it as a lovely sentiment. I did not want to tear the prayer out of the program and put it in my pocket. I did not want to blog about it. After years of being enslaved by my husband’s illness, I want to do what I want when I want. I do not want to suffer. I do not want to be brought low. I do not want to be empty.

“I freely and heartily yield all things to thy pleasure and disposal.”

You’ll notice the words “I want to suffer” are not included in the prayer. What I want is to belong to God. That decision was made in 1992. I am no longer my own. I do belong to God and I will be with him in heaven. That “want” supersedes all of the other “wants” and “don’t wants.”

It’s a tough prayer. I don’t have a profound conclusion that somehow resolves my reluctance to accept God’s will in my life if it involves any kind of suffering or discomfort. I. Don’t. Want. To. Suffer. But it’s an important prayer. It’s way too easy to immerse myself into the hazy, fluffy, “everything’s peachy keen” world of surface religion. But I want the real stuff.

I guess that’s my conclusion:

I want the real stuff.

In Whither Thou Goest, I Will Go, we got to know several precious, funny, clever kids – Charley, Magdalena, William and Susan’s little girls and others.  When the Children’s Blizzard hit, some died.  Some lived.

Why?

Because  I’m the author, and I said so.  I don’t remember all my reasons now.  Maybe I thought this certain death would have more impact.  Maybe I thought this character has been through enough already.  Maybe I’d been writing for five hours straight and my bladder was screaming for relief, which made me irritable enough to kill off a character.  Who knows?

But, as it turns out, in real life, when the Children’s Blizzard hit, some of the people who spent the night exposed on the prairie lived, and some didn’t.  Some of the people who got diphtheria and pneumonia lived, and some didn’t.  Some of the women who got pregnant survived childbirth, and some didn’t.

Later in our history, some of the men who climbed onto the beaches of Normandy lived, and some didn’t.  Some of the soldiers who went to Korea, Vietnam, Iraq came home, some didn’t.  Some of the ones who did come home continued to survive.  Some didn’t.  Some teenagers make it out of high school intact, surviving riding with friends, killing levels of stress, drugs, and their supreme confidence in their own immortality.  Some don’t.

Some children are born healthy, some aren’t.  Some who are born healthy stay that way, some don’t.

Why?  Why does God let some suffer more than others?

Oh, do read on, because obviously I’m going to answer this question in this blog.  It’s so simple really.

No.

Nope.  I’ve got nothing.  Unlike my petty little writing decisions, God makes His out of a depth of goodness that we can’t hope to understand.  I trust God’s reasoning.  I don’t understand it, and don’t expect to.  But I do have one expectation.

I made this little drawing when my husband, Donald, was in the specialty hospital, breathing with a ventilator, confused, fighting multiple infections, trying to communicate by selecting letters as I spelled them out.  Donald was determined to fight on.  Doctors told me that this infection, or the next, or maybe the next, would be his last, and there was no way to stop them coming.

Awful.

I mean, obviously.  The word doesn’t even capture it.  There isn’t a word that does.  But I had the one expectation, so I drew it and hung it over his bed:

So a friend of mine, let’s call him Sushi The Lumberjack, told me this story.  Details are vague to protect identities yada yada yada.

Sushi The Lumberjack was doing some construction work on a house when he heard the owner, a woman, in the next room, talking out loud.  Thinking she was speaking to him, Sushi went to her but found her alone.  He went back to work, but heard  her saying, “He won’t believe me?  Then should I say it anyway?”  Shortly thereafter she came to talk to Sushi.

“Jesus told me you’re not going to believe me, but He wants you to know that everything’s going to be okay.”

“Crazy lady,” Sushi said when he told me the story, but then added, “I was kind of going through a bad time, and now things are better.  You think God does stuff like that?”

That’s always the question, isn’t it?

You come up to me in the grocery store, hand me the pint of fat free sour cream I was looking for and tell me God has a message for me, I’m going to think you’re unhinged.  And annoying.

If I’m burdened by some message for you, from God, and actually get up the nerve to deliver it, you’re going to unfriend me on Facebook.

We believers believe.  We believe that Jesus healed the lepers and the blind man.  We believe that He was born of a virgin, that He died and rose again.  We believe that because He loves us and paid the price for our sins, we’re going to be welcomed into a heaven we don’t deserve.

But do we, can we, believe that God would embarrass us by sending some socially inept person to deliver a message we don’t feel like hearing?

We want to believe that God has more class than that.  You know, God would never double-dip the Doritos at the Christmas office party.  He’d never laugh until goat milk came out of his nose.  He would never expose underlying family tension at a holiday dinner or call someone out on a polite expression of gratitude over an unfortunate regifting.  I mean, ask yourself this question:  He had a body, right?

So, did Jesus fart?

Are you cringing?

I kind of am, truthfully.  Partly because that question only leads to further speculation.  They ate a lot of lentils and olives, right?  Did that make it worse?  Did he ever fart in Temple?  Did he try to look casual, or look around accusingly?  Did he laugh and wave His hand in front of His nose?  So uncool.

Also, we’re talking about our Lord and Savior here.  Surely it’s even a sin to even suggest that He would be less than couth in any social context.  Our Lord and Savior wants us to be happy.  And serene and complacent in our surroundings.    He wants to behave properly in society and to avoid those who act improperly.

You know.

Like John the Baptist.

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