Good morning…
Last week, our therapeutic community group began meeting again at PAWkids in the Grove Park neighborhood of our city. Men and women, young and old, black and white, how wonderful it felt to be back together again. Gathering after our summer break felt like coming home.
Then yesterday, one group member was battling an ugly infection in his swollen mouth. Waking in pain, he reached out for help. One man in our group gave him a ride to the Good Samaritan Health Center, getting one of the two early morning walk-in spots with a dentist. Another woman came to help our friend fill out his paperwork, to sit and to wait with him until he could be seen. Another man helped him to get his medications. I gave the gift I could give, offering my deep prayer support from our home.
Envisioning our friend walking through his dark fears – the throbbing pain, the humility of asking for help, no driver’s license or car, walking into a foreign medical facility, meeting a strange dentist, enduring an uncomfortable procedure, worrying about the financial cost of it all – I prayed through all the possible layers standing between him and a sense of peaceful relief, as I created the wordless prayer card above. I thought to myself, “No wonder people facing poverty might resist going to the doctor or dentist. There are so, so, so many hard hoops to jump through.” Yet the kind, gentle love this young man pours into everything he does made it feel so easy for our group to rally around him, to walk closely beside in his time of need.
After a very eventful morning, we all made it to our 10:00 am group to gather around our familiar table. We unpacked the story of our morning together. I went last, explaining the thoughts I had as I made this prayer card in honor of our friend. “God’s timing is really interesting,” said the therapist who leads our group. “Our activity this morning is to paint what it feels like to pray.”
Copying the central pattern from my wordless prayer card, I painted different layers of color leading into the light at the end of the tunnel. As we finished up our painting process, intuitively I felt compelled to mix all of the leftover colors together in the middle of my paint tray. Amazingly the result was black, purely black paint. I replicated in brushstrokes the sense of the dense surrounding darkness.
In that moment, a new insight dawned.
When all of life’s leftover colors are mixed up together, it is hard to see through the thick, dark jumble. But if we take time to sort out and name the separate colors – green, blue, red, orange, yellow, white – we can begin to see our way forward. Our emotions are like a color wheel of wet paints, aren’t they? If we mix them all together all at once, we can experience the moment as a thick, dark jumble.
The practice of prayer is taking time to separate and name our wide array of feelings. Might we begin with one simple question, “God, what am I feeling right now?” We sit still to listen for the Spirit’s intuitive response.
We welcome the single emotion which rises up first. We quietly come to rest with our sad or our mad, our lonely or our worried. As we feel one feeling at a time with God, we let each of them teach what they are here to teach. Intimate prayer gradually moves us through our many unconscious layers to usher us into the light of God at the center of our being. So then, my dearest friends…be keener than ever to work out the salvation that God has given you with a proper sense of awe and responsibility. For it is God who is at work within you, giving you the will and the power to achieve his purpose (Philippians 2:12, PHILLIPS).
Might prayer be painting each one of our true colors with the God who is deeply at work within each of us? Asking for help as we walk through life’s thick, dark jumble, we are given the will and the power to achieve the eternal purpose of God.
…Sue…
P.S. Our friend gave me his painting of what it feels like to pray. Sunlight. Smile. Stable support. On this special morning, he experienced prayer as a buoying lifeboat on the choppy sea of everyday life.
