Prayer in the Night sits beside me. It is a book I am both gulping and pondering. The author is an Anglican minister named Tish Harrison Warren, and she is becoming my prayer mentor. Prayer has long been kind of a hobby for me, something that gets the leftovers of my time after quilting and running small groups. But I have a rumbling feeling that that relationship will grow. 

 

Tish tells a story about the good people of New Hampshire who understand that the voracious winds can toss you off the mountain. She experienced them herself, though her feet stayed on the ground. Someone, or many someones, have built cairns to hold on to, which when the gales are feisty and the snow is blasting create a sacred guard rail. Tish posits that memorized prayer has been her hand rail when she was a priest who could not pray. 

 

I get it. There are times when I arrive in church feeling battered from what I heard on the news. Then when the words to the songs testify trust in God I climb on as a stowaway. My voice jumps in as if I mean it, and gradually I do. 

 

Tish suggests that sometimes we put the Lord on trial. If He can defend His actions, or lack thereof, we will concede that He is a loving God. We hold our breath for a plausible explanation for the horrors on His watch. But maybe we are casting ourselves as God's customers. Society has hammered into us the expectation that the customer is always right. No matter how greedily or unreasonably the buyer behaves, the exhausted but compliant employee does everything possible to appease them. Or they might, heaven forbid, take their business elsewhere. 

 

The inescapable truth is that we are vulnerable. At any moment someone I adore can be ripped away. Just that possibility threatens to hurl me off my mountain. Yet God never promised that I would be exempt from pain. His only covenant was to be my cairn. A mound of stones to find my way.