Making Bricks.

"And I prayed and said, 'God if you are real, make that branch move...now...now...right now.'"  

A few years ago I was talking to a friend and he was telling me about how he would test God when he was a boy.  He wanted to believe in God, but he just needed some sort of confirmation.  As soon as he told me this story I immediately remembered doing the same thing.  I would lay in a field and as different things came into view I would whisper "Make it move."  This friend had just recently come out of addiction and was starting to feel the presence of God again.  However I don't think he could shake the boyhood disappointment.  As grown men we may not ask God so innocently to show himself, but the ache remains of not knowing if he is there.  If he would just show himself, then I could believe!  Arguments about the nature of faith and doubt and why God can't just reveal himself don't quite do the trick in this scenario.  There is plenty of theology to be offered, but none of it gets to the heart of the matter.  This is a boy in the open grass looking at the sky asking to be loved and protected.  He is asking for hope.  

Whatever we ask of God, everything we send his direction, is a prayer.  There are good prayers and there are bad prayers.  For every human emotion, there is a brand of prayer that corresponds: embarrassment, fear, hope, gratitude, loneliness and on and on.  A boy wishing for God to make a tree or cloud or rock move, is a prayer.  An angry grieving father screaming at the sky is a prayer.  A young girl standing on a mountainside overwhelmed with emotion, is a prayer.  

Prayer is like making bricks.  We each have to make our own.  When we first begin to pray, we really don't know what we are doing.  As a child we may have someone teach us, show us how, but until we can make it personal it can feel like we are just piling up bricks, not knowing what to do with them.  Christ has always heard my prayers and certainly answered more than a few as I grew up.  But I could only make that connection in retrospect.  I think I only began to really understand prayer about 10 years ago.  I was sitting in a doctor's waiting room.  There was a young child getting blood drawn and he was hysterical with fear and pain.  I was a tender Christian at that time and everything felt magic and new.  In the moment I just felt the urge to pray.  I offered my prayer to this Jesus, that I still didn't quite understand, basically saying "Is this right?".  The boy immediately became quiet and passive.  He was still, like someone turned off his fear.  It's certainly debatable if Jesus answered my prayer or this was just coincidence of timing.  But what I began to understand in that moment is the idea of offering something to Jesus and asking him to do something with it.  In that moment, I was a boy, offering Jesus a clump of mud.  I didn't know how to make bricks yet.  

We dig in the mud and we make these bricks, hoping to do something with them.  When we make them we have something in mind, we are expecting an outcome.  We may make them with care or in desperate haste but it is not the quality or the skill of the brick maker that matters.  What matters is that we offer them to Jesus.  He will decide what is to be done.  We have to learn to trust him with our bricks, to do whatever he knows is best.  He may build a wall to prevent you from an area of weakness, or pave a path to some new road, or stairs to take you above and over something awful.  Or he may just make something beautiful because that is who he is.  We get so lost sometimes in our faith that we scramble to make piles and piles of bricks and forget to give them to the master mason.  We sit among our ruins wondering why things are so desolate, why is God so far away.  At times we make terrible bricks, with our sin hoping to be hidden in them and hoping God will use them any way.  He cannot.  Building with faulty bricks will lead to our destruction.  At times, the amount of bricks needed seems too much and we are overwhelmed.  And then we look up to see our brothers and sisters making bricks with us, offering them with full hearts to our Christ.  And then sometimes it is our turn to bare the burden.  A worn out and desperate soul drops a load of bricks at our feet and cries, "Help!"  We can tell them what to do with those bricks or that we will offer our own.  But of course what is needed is labor and time, help in carrying all that weight to Jesus.  For some, they see the enormous amount of bricks that are needed, yet they persist.  There is no reason for them to think that they could ever produce enough to make a difference, but they continue anyway.  They are head down, thoughtfully making bricks in the dirt and heat, head bowed and lifting them one by one to their savior.  When they finally look up, they will be in awe to see the work he has done.  The Great Architect has laid out the plan for his creation.  The Great Mason has called us into his work.  We can accept this and worship him with our surrender, or we can go off and build our own crumbling world.  Either way, his will be done.

And what of the boy in the field, offering something, but what to God?  The boy's prayers are less like brick making and more like dirt clod throwing, trying to provoke the Almighty, "Look at me!"  He is looking, he is always present.    If God accepts that dirt clod and moves the stone, that boy will never learn how to make bricks.  He will be stuck forever throwing dirt clods, never knowing what it's like to build with Jesus.  He is whispering and waiting for you to offer a sincere prayer to him, to gently take it from your hand and begin to show you the wonders of what his Love can build.