Timely Prayer

In late November of last year, I presided as my family buried my dad at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Jacksonville, Florida. It’s a beautiful church and the courtyard is a place of urban peace. Some of the bushes need a bit more tending and you hear the occasional siren passing by, but there’s a fountain and you can feel the prayers of generations as you walk about the place. If Dad has to be somewhere, I guess I’m glad it’s there.

But Good Shepherd holds a bit more significance for me than that. My wife and I lived just a few blocks from there early in our marriage. We never attended there regularly because I was on staff at another church, but we always loved it. We loved the way it towered over the neighborhood; we loved its history of love and justice; we loved its beauty. I’d often alter my driving route, just to make sure I’d pass it.

My dad knew all of this. So when I went to seminary, Dad started to pray, especially when he’d walk or run past the church, which was often. (My dad was passionate about running, and if you didn’t know that he’d always be happy to tell you about it.) He’d pray, he told me, that I could be the priest at that church one day.

He knew I loved it, but he also knew how much he’d have loved for me to be a priest at a church so close. Dad loved his people being close. My brother sent me a snippet from a journal entry of his:

“I fear death only because I do not want to leave my family... EVER. I love them all so much that I don't even like to leave for a short vacation. I love being with them, spending time together, whatever it is, Vicki and I enjoy it most with our children.”

That wasn’t odd to read or discover. That was Dad. Nothing made him happier than having his children, their spouses, and their children under one roof. Communal living wasn’t going to work out, so having everyone in the same zip code, or at least the same city, was going to have to suffice. I did not live in the same town as my dad for the last 11 years of his life. I only lived nearby for 1 of those years.

I don’t think he ever counted it against me. Not really. He understood that my calling as a minister might take me to new places. I’d been in Chattanooga for 7 years or so when he died, and he genuinely seemed to love the place. I’m sure that deep down he’d rather I’d have lived at home, but he never made me feel guilty for it. In one of my last conversations with him, he explicitly told me what a great city and community he thought we had found. I’m grateful for that conversation. But it all still makes me feel deeply guilty.

And I say all this as a way of getting back to the prayers—the prayers my dad prayed that I might be the priest at Good Shepherd. I prayed the same prayers. All through seminary I prayed them. I even plucked up the courage one day to ask the Bishop of Florida about it. I can’t recall why, but I was riding in his car in Sewanee—he might have been taking a few of us out to lunch—and I was his last drop-off, so I just asked him if it was a possibility. Did Good Shepherd need a curate? I think his answer was along the lines of “Not really,” which I took to mean there was a possibility. So I kept praying.

But, as it turned out, there wasn’t. I went to a different church out of seminary in Jacksonville Beach, which was much closer to Dad than Sewanee, but still not all that close. About a year later, my family and I were off to Tennessee again. Good Shepherd and the dream of being the priest there faded from my prayers and I’m assuming from my dad’s as well.

But then, just a couple of years ago, they did need a priest. I talked to my dad about it. I talked to my wife and kids about it. We all agreed it wasn’t the right time for me to apply. I’d been at my current post only a few years, I was doing good work there, and I absolutely loved the church. It was also the beginning of the pandemic, which seemed like a terrible time to make any sort of change.

But if I’m being honest, this is another crushing regret. After all those years of praying, I didn’t go for it. They called a fine priest, so perhaps I wouldn’t have been called there if I had applied. But I didn’t, so we’ll never know. And in the weeks after my dad’s death, this is what woke me up at night. Why didn’t I?

“Not the right time.” That seems like an absurd reason at this point. If I’d been offered that job, I could’ve spent so much more time with my dad in the year before his death. We’d prayed and prayed over this, so why did we ignore the chance when it was right there?

I can’t tell you those haunting questions have gone away. I’m not sure they ever will. But I have begun to sense the answer to them.

The prayerbook appoints this collect for the Sunday closest to July 20 each year:

“Almighty God, the fountain of all wisdom, you know our necessities before we ask and our ignorance in asking: Have compassion on our weakness, and mercifully give us those things which for our unworthiness we dare not, and for our blindness we cannot ask; through the worthiness of your Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.”

The sense—and this isn’t the only place you find it— is that although our prayers matter deeply, God knows more about what to do with them than we could hope to understand. So I’ve pondered whether this wasn’t at work in my dad’s prayers and mine that I might be the priest at Good Shepherd one day.

Because I was. On November 26, 2021, for a brief time in the afternoon, I was the priest there. I led the prayers, I preached the gospel, I encouraged God’s people, and I laid my precious father to rest. It was an awful thing to do, a thing I could not have done. Not without much prayer and much grace—and the grace was there. I was emotional. I had a hard time. But I made it. And I’m convinced I made it because we prayed. Dad prayed that I could be the priest there one day. And because of his faithfulness to that prayer, God’s grace was there when I needed it most.

I wonder how often this is the case in life. How often do we pray and pray for the thing we think we most want or need, only to find it missing, unavailable to us? How often do we assume that God has gone delinquent, unable or unwilling to give us our way? When the truth is, God’s understanding of time is on the scale of eternity. So perhaps the grace God works through our prayers isn’t for us to know or experience. It’s for someone in the past. It’s for someone in the future. It’s for a time when we didn’t realize we’d need it, when we’re least capable of asking for it.

And this is one reason we must continue in the hard work of prayer. Why we trust God to tend to and change those prayers over the years. How we believe that no prayer is wasted, even those that seem to have come up empty, even those that haunt us just a little bit.