The Secret Power of Prayer

The one lonely desperate thing that was left for me to do – and it wasn’t pointing a gun and pulling the trigger, as many these days interpret as the only thing left to do – either at themselves or another person – but that’s a different topic for a different story… But,  I digress… I did that one desperate thing from the bottomest rock bottom of my hopeless heart.

I prayed.

I know.  It sounds so revolutionary.

Some would say, Big deal. People pray all the time.

Which is true. They do.

There are all kinds of prayers and all kinds of people.

But this is not a study on prayer or study of people, just an account of one single prayer and the effect it had on one single people that is me.  

It’s more like a story about an acorn and how it became a tree than anything else.

But, again I digress…

This is what I said to God that day:

God, You who created this world out of NOTHING, make me a gardener.

Looking back, I could have prayed a slew of other things… But at that moment of hopelessness, it boiled down to…

Who God is and what God does. 

Namely, omnipotent Creator God doing the impossible.

And then, the inexplicable,

Make me a gardener!

What was I thinking???

Most honestly, I don’t know.

I don’t know why I prayed that. I had no gardening aspirations whatsoever. I am a city girl not a farmer. A writer not a dirt-digger.

But, maybe somewhere deep down, beyond the threshold of conscious understanding, I knew that it would take a radical change of identity to change my dire dismal yard/neighbor situation.

Maybe I knew beyond logical explanation that it would take a different person than me to accomplish what I wanted to see in my garden. With my current resources and the current persons at hand (namely me and our two highly destructive toddlers) the only way a change could happen would be if I was willing to change my identity.

And with this prayer, I was saying an unequivocal O.K. to God to do the impossible and change me. 

I think only absolutely completely totally desperate people are truly willing to become the change they want to see in the world.