Prayer: Like Lighting Dynamite

Back in the late 1990s when my daughter still rode around in a car seat, we had several droughts in Texas. The second time, more than sixty days passed without a drop from the sky. One afternoon during that time, as I drove us home from the club where I swim, we spotted a grass fire in the median. I pulled out my cell phone and called the fire department pronto.

Several days later, we passed that stretch of grass, scorched from the blaze. My little girl wanted to know all about it: Should we be scared? Is it bad to call 911? What causes fires? Will it happen again? Why did the grass burn? Why? Why? Why?

I explained that the grass needed a drink—that all the Texas grass needed a drink, that the plants were thirsty, that the trees craved rain.

“What can we do?” she asked.

“All we can do is pray.”

“Right now?”

“I suppose,” I said. “Now’s as good a time as any.”

She insisted I pray.

“OK,” I said. So I kept my eyes on the road and started talking to God. I told Him about how the grass needed a drink. I reminded Him that the trees were thirsty. And I told Him we were scared we’d run out of water. “Please, God,” I pleaded, “we need rain.” When I finished, she prayed too, with that childlike, simple faith Jesus commends.

About twenty seconds after we finished, a huge drop splashed on my windshield. I looked around to see if a truck was leaking fluid. Then another drop hit. And another.

Ohmyword! It dawned on me.

“HE SAID YES!” my daughter screamed from the back seat. “HE SAID YES!”

Sure enough, that liquid was coming from the sky, and it was rain. I dabbed my eyes and kept on driving. Other drivers pulled over, got out of their cars, and threw their arms in the air in fits of unbridled joy.

“HE SAID YES!” my daughter kept screaming.

“Yes, He did,” I whispered, shaking my head as I marveled at the timing. It seemed so coincidental. (William Temple, the ninety-eighth archbishop of Canterbury, was known to have said, “When I pray, coincidences happen; and when I don’t pray, they don’t happen.”)

James reminded his readers that God hears the prayers of ordinary people: “Elijah was a human being like us, and he prayed earnestly that it would not rain and there was no rain on the land for three years and six months” (James 5:17). Sometimes we get the idea that God answers the prayers of the superspiritual while He glosses over the requests of us lesser mortals. Why should God answer some mom and her little girl driving by a burned median in Texas? Yet that’s James’s point—Elijah was just like us, and see what his prayers accomplished? Prayer is access to supreme power. If we really grasped that truth, people would have to pry us out of our prayer closets.

In Colossians 4:2, Paul packs a lot of instruction on prayer into one short verse. He says it’s something we should be devoted to, alert in, and something we should give thanks with.

To be devoted to something is to persist at it. Paul’s word for devoted to was often used to describe a boat docked, continually ready for use. To be devoted to prayer is to cling to it with persistent attention and perseverance.

That kind of prayer is not the stuff we tack on after the fact when we’ve run out of all other options. “All we can do is pray,” I had said, as if praying is barely a cut above nothing. In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard writes, “On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, making up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.”

Dillard is right. Praying is like lighting dynamite.

If we truly believed that, Paul wouldn’t have to remind us to be alert. How many times do we, like the disciples in Gethsemane, doze off during our prayers rather than staying vigilant? I don’t know about you, but I doubt I’d doze off near a bomb squad working to dismantle wires before the clock reaches a big red ZERO.

Excerpted from Cappuccino with Colossians.