Part One: Prayer
If someone had suggested to me, in my early adult years, that I didn’t really understand prayer, I would have rolled my eyes. By the time I was 23 I had attended 17 years of rigorous Evangelical Christian schooling and was exposed to all the typical modes of prayer within that tradition. This was followed by a further year of training and seven years of service with a missions organization that heavily emphasized intercessory prayer and quiet time practices.
While these modes of prayer were useful and rewarding in various life circumstances, all of them evaporated like mist in the hot sun when one of my children was diagnosed with several neurodevelopmental disorders at the age of three. The despair I felt at these devastating diagnoses cannot be described. Bereft of all hope, I felt completely alone and terrified for my child and the trajectory of their life. If I ever needed a strong prayer foundation, it was now.
Unfortunately, all of the methods and models of prayer that I had been taught fell completely flat during this time of heartbreak. I’m not saying they are not valuable in other situations, but in a place of trauma and despair, they felt completely inadequate. Most of the prayer methods centered heavily on my words, my requests, my thoughts, but in this season, I had none of those things. I had no words. I had no hope. I had nothing to bring to the table but a broken heart.
I remember sitting in my prayer spot one morning, going through the motions of a devotional, but it was not working. In fact, my pretending just compounded the despair I felt at my life circumstances. I was at my breaking point and knew I only had a short time before my family woke up, and I would have to deal with the crushing reality of my child’s disabilities for another long day. In my despair I cried out to God, “I’m not going to make it until bedtime if you don’t do something right now. I’m dying inside and I can’t do this without you, so you’d better show up. I’m not leaving this chair until you do.” I cradled my head in my hands and sobbed out all the wordless pain and heartbreak within me to God. I was done being strong and having any good Christian words or prayers.
As the minutes went by I noticed something happening internally. I felt almost as if a gentle warmth was filling the aching cavities of my heart, slowly burning away the despair and sadness. In the place of those two overwhelming emotions, the heat slowly began to fill me with hope and peace. If I allowed worries or questions or prayer requests to come into this space, the glow would fade, but if I held the space open, humbly accepting the warmth and love, it continued to fill me until I felt like I was overflowing.
I held this space until my family woke up and was surprised when the power of it lingered with me all day. It didn’t erase the hard situations of the day, but it made them bearable. So, you’d better believe the next day, I was back in that prayer chair demanding the same thing of God, without any apology! And the next day. And the next day. My soul was starving and encounters like this became the manna that sustained me through the day.
Sometimes I would get a mental picture of myself as a baby, held in the arms of a loving Father. Other times I would be sitting on a bench next to a person I knew to be Jesus, His arm wrapped tightly around my shoulder. Other times I would see myself floating in an alpine lake, knowing that the water of my vision was the love of God surrounding and upholding me.
Theologically, I didn’t know what I thought about this new way of being with God. I had no real language to describe or defend what I was doing. I didn’t talk about my new prayer experiences to anyone, not even my husband. Many of them felt too private to share, but I also wondered if people would think I was crazy or straying into something outside the boundaries of Christianity.
Despite my secretiveness about these experiences, there was NO WAY I was giving them up. I was no longer barely “hanging on” in my day-to-day existence. Somehow, even in the face of my external realities, I felt peace and hope as I navigated the challenges and heartbreak of parenting a disabled child. My internal landscape transitioned from one of constant despair and bare survival to one of strength and other surprising emotions--contentment, gratitude, and even extended times of joy in my hours and days.