The Jaguar All-Terrain Challenge at Highland Hills Park during my cross country season of eighth grade was supposed to be my first three mile race. By mile one, I was praying for it to be over. I tried and failed to keep up a decent pace and I bent my head, clasped my hands, and thought Dear God, I would be so grateful if I didn’t have to keep this up for two more miles. A few feet later I took a sharp turn out of the woods and found myself a hundred meters from the finish line.
I wasn’t particularly grateful when I saw that my prayers had been answered; it just meant that my least favorite part of any race, the sprint to the finish, was closer. And when I learned that the course had accidentally been measured almost two miles short, I wasn’t grateful that God had dulled the mind of some parent plotting the trail, just resentful that I’d wasted my one, and maybe only, miracle on something as stupid as a cross country race.
Even though I’ve been a Christian all my life and went to some flavor of Sunday school five times a week as a kid, I never really bought into the idea that God skews the odds in favor of the faithful. This skepticism probably links back to childhood bitterness from the time in Vacation Bible School when the teacher opened class by asking everyone what they prayed for. The rest of the kids, who seemed to have a blurred distinction between God and Santa, gave typically Texan answers: a four-wheeler, a nice dress to wear to church, an assault rifle to call one’s own. When it got to me, I said what I was sure the right answer: “I pray that God makes me more faithful and nicer to everyone.” And, when I didn’t attain priesthood, or even a round of applause, I think my soul mutated into the weird species I became.
But, even if I wanted to believe in miracles or prayer, I’d have a hard time defending it to myself. Because how do you explain the people who don’t get their miracles? If you can pray away cancer, then does that mean everyone who dies of it is really just suffering from weak faith? That seems cruel, and a recipe for self-hatred as soon as you face hardship. We’ve all heard miracle stories, but I’ve never seen a real one for myself, though I’ve seen plenty of bad situations meet their harsh and predictable end, and plenty of tragedies arise from nowhere. Of the nine kids in my second grade class, eight are still alive. From my six third grade classmates, only five are left. Every one of those kids loved God and prayed their hardest. That just doesn’t make any sense.
Since childhood, but especially after I started hearing about my classmates’ deaths, I came up with an idea of God as some sort of divine telepath. You could pray, and maybe get an answer or good advice, but you’d never get anything tangible. Logic governed everything physical, God’s domain only stretched into your mind, which might just be your own delusions anyway. It was an odd faith, one that imagined a God with absolute power over everything, but who never really did much with it for some reason. But it was the only way to walk the line between two intolerable ideas: that my classmates and cousin and great-uncle and the grandparents I never met and everyone else that I’ve known who has died are gone, and that some God had consciously chosen that they should suffer and rot and leave here forever.
I’ve gotten into a habit on this blog of digging a hole and then challenging myself to find a way out of it. But now I’m in too deep, my funny little anecdote about a wasted miracle in middle school landed me in a conundrum that no one has ever proposed a real way out of. If I knew why good people die, why there is pain in the world, then it would be a real shame to waste it on a blog post that maybe fifty people will read.
The best I can come up with is that prayers and miracles do have their place. Not after the fact, of course. After the fact you just have to mourn and hope that there is some meaning underneath all of this, someplace better that your loved one went to, some reasoning that transcends understanding. But whenever I get an email from my church about someone in a dire situation, I can’t help but pray. Because even if God is nothing but a holy comforter, even if God is nothing at all, there’s no harm in it, and there’s a whole lot of good in hope.
And maybe prayers should be more than requests anyway. Maybe, for every second that’s pleasant, or even normal, there should be gratitude too.
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