June 9, 2009: "Do It Again Just The Same Way, God"

Nine-year-old Michelle wanted a bicycle very badly, though it seemed unlikely that her father, a struggling dairy farmer, could afford one. She decided one night to pray for a bike with all the spiritual effort she could muster. At church she had heard about fasting, and also that Jesus said that when you prayed you weren't supposed to tell anyone about it, but go to your closet and shut the door and pray there. (Our newer translations of Matthew 6:6 say "your room", but the old King James Version said "thy closet".) So she dismissed herself from the dinner table without eating, went to her room, shut herself in the closet, and prayed for a bike as long and as hard as she could. Then she went to bed.

The next afternoon her father called her and her two sisters out to the barn where - Hallelujah! - there stood three shiny new bikes. The kindness of God gave her more than she asked for, because it even included her sisters in the bounty of joy.

But the climax of that story was not revealed till a quarter of a century later, when Michelle told her father for the first time that he had gotten those bikes right after she had prayed so hard for one. He teared up and told her, "You don't know the half of it." He explained that that morning when he checked the mailbox there was a blank envelope with three one-hundred dollar bills in it. He did not know, and does not know to this day, who put them there. He thought about paying bills with the money, and maybe a wise steward would have done just that. But he loved his longsuffering daughters, and wanted to do something special for them, and so he went to town and bought the bikes. I know this story is true, because I heard it from my sister Grace, Michelle's aunt.

Thirty-five-year-old Jennie's desperate prayer was starker than Michelle's. Jennie was deathly ill with what was later diagnosed as tularemia. She had prayed for healing but only got worse; now she just wanted to know whether she would live or die. She put a "fleece" before the Lord, like Gideon in Judges chapter 6. She prayed, "Lord, if I'm going to live, please let Laverne come over today." Laverne, Jennie's sister, occasionally stopped by to help with housework and take care of Jennie's four children.

Laverne, however, didn't come. Jennie did receive one kind visitor that day, old Mrs. Foster from church, but her sister never knocked on the door. Jennie went to bed that night thinking that if the Lord honored her request, she would need to put her affairs in order and prepare to die.

But, lying in bed, a sudden thought struck her with the force of a lightning bolt. She cried out to her husband, "Honey! Do you know what Mrs. Foster's first name is? " "Of course," he said, "Laverne." That was the only day, ever, that Laverne Foster stopped by to visit the mother of four who, three years later, became my mother too.

When my sister told me about Michelle and the miracle bike, I said, after recovering from gooseflesh, "I wonder what Michelle asked for the next week: 'Oh God! Now make it a car! I want a car this time!'." But Grace corrected me. "No, Michelle never asked like that again."

Good for her. Maybe Michelle understood that a holy moment like that was not the kind of thing that she should expect to be repeated. "Upping the ante" of a prayer like that would not be a sign of faith, but a sign of greed coupled with an effort to manipulate God.

My mother understood that too. Though she received a stunning answer to her prayer, she never again put a fleece before the Lord. She told me, "I should have just received whatever God would have chosen to give me, whether life or death. But in my weakness I had to know, and he graciously responded. I would never test him like that again though." And she advised that I never do it either.

In Letters to Malcom: Chiefly on Prayer, C. S. Lewis writes, "It would be rash to say that there is any prayer which God never grants. But the strongest candidate is the prayer we might express in the single word encore." That gets it exactly right. Christians must develop a sense of gratitude for those things that God chooses to do only once - without expecting (or, heaven forbid, demanding) that he repeat the pattern of yesterday. Look for new and different graces from the Lord.

I've been reading through the gospel of John lately, and several examples from that book come to mind. In John 6 Jesus miraculously feeds 5,000 men, but when the crowd follows him the next day looking for another meal, he refuses to give it to them, and even rebukes them. In John 11 Jesus resurrects Lazarus, who was probably killed soon afterward (see John 12:10). If Lazarus was indeed killed later, it is hard to imagine his sisters sending word to Jesus, "He's dead again. You need to come back!" Or take John 13, where Jesus assumes the role of a slave and washes his disciples' feet. How perfectly awful it would have been if, during one of his resurrection appearances, some idiot disciple approached him and said, "Hey, Jesus, glad to see you! Here's a bucket, go get yourself a towel. I'm afraid I stepped in it outside, and could really use a good cleaning."

There are some things, of course, that God does repeat. He repeats his pardon. His mercies are new every morning. I'll not test him on a one-and-done, but, for my daily offering of sin, I'll trust his daily supply of grace.