A Voicemail Message to God

I am not terribly comfortable writing about the subject of prayer. If I wrote a book about my early prayer life, it would be a pamphlet. Or a postcard.

My first prayer memory involved spending the night at my grandmother’s house. My grandmother would put me in bed and make me say “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.  If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” I would then lie in bed, wide-eyed, terrified to fall asleep, with thoughts of my own death swirling in my head. 

I pretty much avoided prayer after that unless it was forced upon me in a communal setting, like Mass, and then my mind was certainly not on God or my own transgressions, but rather how much longer I was trapped at church. I was not a willing participant in my youth. 

In my college years, prayers boiled down to begging God for some result because I was terrified at the outcome of a situation.  Please keep my brother out of trouble.  Please help me get into law school.  Please make money appear in my checking account. 

Through this circuitous journey, I stumbled back into prayer, largely as a result of my every-so-slow recognition that I really didn’t know best. I was no longer convinced of my own righteousness. 

It was not easy to start praying.  In the beginning, I stuck with formal, well-known prayers. Over the past few years, I have taken the leap to talking to God in my own words.  At first, I would pray in the fashion of what I call “leaving a blithering voicemail for God.”  Have you ever started leaving a message for someone, and you just can’t stop talking? You simply cannot end the message?  Well, that is what I would do.  “God, Hi, this is Kathleen (of course you know that God, sorry, you know everything, I shouldn’t have said that)…God here’s what happened (you know that too!  Sorry God)…”  And it just went on and on from there, with no real beginning and no real ending. I would end up embarrassed that I had spoken a poorly constructed prayer to the Almighty.

And yet, I believe that even those blithering voicemails to God were acceptable, even welcome, to him. What he really wants is our conversation, to meet him with dialogue. He wants for us to recognize that it is his righteousness, not ours, that makes us redeemable and redeemed. It is in those poorly constructed, grammatically incorrect prayers that we reveal recognition of our flaws.  Recognition of our imperfections can lead us back to God and make us thirst for his mercy.