Comic Relief

It’s been hard for me to stay focused for a prolonged period lately. My mind is constantly drifting off to quick prayers, imagining a miracle or working through in my mind the things, both practical and spiritual, that I need to help my loved ones work through if I don’t get a miracle. At any rate, that means I’m having difficulty with the kind of intense, prolonged prayer that I have engaged in at times past.

This past Monday, Roland and I attended a district prayer meeting that now happens once a month. Fifteen people were there. Some of the prayer was deeply felt stuff from people’s hearts. Some was still legitimate but less deeply personal, like prayers for the success of upcoming church programs and so forth. At any rate, my mind was beginning to wander back to my own stuff and I was really trying to stay focused. One of my tactics for doing that was just to silently pray along with whoever was praying at that moment, agreeing with that person in prayer, and asking God to grant whatever petition he or she was making.

That tactic for staying focused and in the spirit of prayer with the rest of the group broke down horribly when one young man prayed: “Lord, we pray also for the pastors.” Now there’s nothing in the world wrong with that. It’s a good, necessary, important prayer. My problem is that Australians pronounce the word “pastor” exactly the way we and they pronounce the word “pasta”. So I didn’t hear: “we pray for the pastors”; I heard: “Lord, we pray also for the pastas” and instantly my silly mind was lost to prayer. I went right along with him, agreeing with him in prayer on that misunderstood petition. In my mind I imagined myself praying earnestly:

“Yes, Lord, we pray also for the pastas. We pray for the spaghetti, Lord, and for the rigatoni and the cannelloni. Yea, Lord, even for the macaroni do we pray, both seashell and elbow.”

I was just killing myself and couldn’t share it with anyone. If I had so much as looked at Roland, I would have burst out laughing out loud before I could have explained it to him, and completely disrupted the prayer time. I couldn’t tell him, anyway, though, because Michael Schmidt, our dear district superintendent, was sitting between us. I’m quickly coming to love and appreciate Michael, but I don’t yet know his sense of humor well enough to dare sharing it with him. On the one hand, if he shared my sense of humor it would look bad for the DS to disrupt the prayer meeting by laughing out loud at an inappropriate time. On the other hand, if he decidedly did not share my sense of humor, I’d sound like a blaspheming heretic or something. For a second, as my shoulders shook and I hoped people would think I was crying, I thought I was going to have to just get up and go outside where I could laugh properly.

Finally, the man who had begun praying for the pastas began to get emotional as he prayed for stuff about which he felt very deeply on a personal level, and my heart was drawn to him and through him back into the spirit of prayer. There’s a verse in the Bible that says “Laughter does the heart good like a medicine” so I trust that we don’t leave his presence, and he doesn’t leave us as we move from earnest tears to silly laughter and back again.

In this moment I feel good physically, He has given us this day our daily bread, people all over the world are expressing their love, appreciation and concern for me, lifting me up to our Abba Daddy for a miracle and for peace in the meantime, and in this moment, we have unashamed laughter and joy in his presence. Maybe he laughs when we play the way we laugh when we watch our children play.