What It Looks Like When Your Whole Life Becomes A Prayer
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(OPINION) My buddy Gary is retired now, but for a number of years, he ran a drive-thru coffee kiosk in the town where I live.
He hails from California by way of Oregon, and he’s just cut from a different cloth than a lot of us here. I think of his as a West Coast state of mind.
He’s not what I’d call an old hippie, exactly, but he’s definitely a free spirit and a traveler. He’s had adventures, a few of which might not be suitable for a religion column in a family newspaper.
About 30 years ago, he, his wife, Joan, their two younger sons and Gary’s mom, Mary, moved across the country to Kentucky to help look after Joan’s aging parents. Joan and the boys came first, then Gary and his mother followed shortly after, pulling the kiosk with a truck.
For several thousand miles between Oregon and the Bluegrass, Gary and Mary listened to a series of my sermons about God’s boundless, loving grace, which Joan had sent them.
“I found an awesome church and we’re never leaving,” Joan had notified Gary as a sort of advertisement.
By the time their truck finally washed up on the shores of Montgomery County, Gary had been remade, he says. He and his family indeed joined the church where I’m pastor, and ever since then Gary has been what used to be called a sold-out Christian, a Christian of the best sort — jolly, kindly, open-hearted, animated.
A few years after Gary and his family arrived, when my first wife was dying and I was taking care of her and we were in the hardest period of our life together, I used to visit Gary’s coffee shop sometimes two or three times a day.
For one thing, I’m a coffee connoisseur, or at least an addict, and Gary served the best coffee I’d ever had. For another, it helped me to see him for five or 10 minutes. Every visit was like a mind reset, from my gloom and grief to his unmitigated faith and joy.
In that little kiosk where Gary worked, he was hanging out with Jesus Christ all day, every day. Don’t ask me to explain it.
But when I’d pull up to the drive-thru window, Gary and Jesus always seemed to be having the best time ever, happily slinging lattes to desperate pilgrims like me, sharing a laugh over something weird they’d seen on the busy street that ran by the coffee shop.
“Guess what the Lord just told me,” Gary might say as way of greeting.
Then he’d launch into a story about, say, some poor lady from Ohio or West Virginia or Timbuktu who’d happened by not five minutes before. Maybe she was crying when she pulled up and Gary had asked if she was OK and she said no, that she’d just found out her teenage son got busted for selling pot. That quick, Jesus whispered in Gary’s ear that he should tell the lady her kid was going to be fine and God loved her so much and, by the way, the smoothie was on the house. And the lady drove away drying her eyes and smiling.
I admit I never actually saw Jesus in Gary’s coffee shop. But Gary saw him — or felt his presence or heard his quiet voice — pretty much constantly. And I saw an image of Jesus refracted through Gary.
“Hey, I talk to him like I talk to you,” Gary would say. “We talk about everything, you know? All day long.”
Today, he’s still at it. He and Jesus build and repair furniture in a workshop behind Gary’s house, for instance. They even commune on the golf course.
“He’s right there,” Gary told me the other day. “I don’t ‘expect’ an answer, but I get one.”
There are many forms of prayer. Congregational prayers. Praying the Psalms. Breath prayers. Journaling prayers. Centering prayers. There are books on how to pray and there are prayer workshops and prayer retreats.
All these have their place. Each can work its own wonders.
But when I think of Gary, I think of my favorite type of prayer — the kind that occurs when the Lord becomes so real and present in your life it’s hard to tell where God leaves off and you begin. The two of you are one. He’s in your heart, in your mind, on your tongue.
Every act becomes holy then, from mixing a macchiato to planting a daylily to serving Communion to laying hands on the sick to taking the dog to the vet. Everything shimmers with divine presence. Everything has eternal purpose.
If the Spirit lives inside you, sometimes it’s actually better not to become obsessed with parsing out the proper doctrines and calibrating the theology of this to a fare-thee-well. Sometimes it’s better to go with the flow, as Gary has always done.
Trust that God’s as near as the air in your lungs, as the longings in your soul. Believe God is right here, all the time, talking to you and listening to you, seeing the world through your eyes and letting you glimpse the world through his.
Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.