TALKING TO HER

Dear Spike:

I watched a man pray to God for a good poker hand, last night.

"Come on Lord,” he cried as he waited for the dealer to act during the final table of the World Series of Poker’s Main Event. “You have a purpose for me today. I will glorify your name Lord, I will glorify your name. With the money I make I will glorify your name.”

If there is a God, and I choose to believe there is, I’d like to think she’s above this sort of obscene deal making.

Then again, gamblevangelist Jerry Yang did walk away from that table with $8.25 million. So at very least, we know that God is tolerant of buffoons.

If you choose to believe in God – and in our family, that is a choice, rather than a directive — I hope you’ll have an easier time talking to her than I have had.

I simply never know what to say. In a universe equally grand in majesty and tragedy, my praises and concerns have always seemed inconsequential. So I have little advice on how to pray, save this:

“When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the churches and on the street corners... When you pray, go into your room and close the door.”

I didn’t come up with that, by the way. It came from Jesus Christ. It’s what he said right before he taught his followers the Pater Noster — the Lord’s Prayer.

You might think that a Christian’s $8.25 million effort to glorify God should begin with respecting Christ’s strikingly simple and completely unambiguous set of instructions on prayer, but our species is particularly bad at practicing what has been preached.

And when our worldly self interests contradict what we believe God wants, we don’t just throw God out. We subjugate her.

I’m not beyond the ability to believe that God might answer a prayer or two, here and there. But on her to-do list, I choose to believe that famine, genocide and pandemic disease are a little closer to the top than poker hands, football games and pay raises.

God does not care if Jerry Yang wins at poker, no matter what measly and insulting promise he’s made about the money.

She doesn’t root for the Broncos. She doesn’t care whether Barry Bonds breaks Hank Aaron’s home run record. And she’s probably bored by NASCAR, too.

She doesn’t control traffic on the interstate. She doesn’t keep the stock market from crashing. And with all due respect to our current president, who apparently believes the phone in his office rings directly to the one in her office, she doesn’t take sides in a war (much less choose to start one.)

Oh, you can pray to her for any of those things. And while you’re at it, go ahead and promise to glorify her name. And if you’re going to do that, you might as well do it while standing on a street corner.

At least then you might have someone to listen to you. Because she won't be.

Love,
dad