This picture of my granddaughter Sophie says something important about prayer to me. It is this. Never forget to peek.
Now, granted, Sophie is just learning to pray. She does know the grace they say at her preschool and always ends it with an enthusiastic amen. So far, I haven’t been able to understand the rest of the words she rattles off in sing-song. She does not yet know the Lord’s Prayer, but she likes to follow along in the Prayer Book. She cannot yet read the words and has no idea about the meaning of most of what is being said around her, but I suspect she has some intuitive sense of awe and gratitude. But when it comes to hands clasped, heads down, eyes closed prayer, she peeks. I’m glad she does. Somehow she knows that Jesus may have been taken from our sight, but that doesn’t mean he is not present among us in so many ways. Or it may be she is just curious. Curious has a lot to with experiencing God around us, I think.
Sophie calls to mind for me the ending of this week’s lesson from Acts (1:1-11). After some final words, Jesus ascended, or as Luke puts it, “When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight” (v. 9). Not surprisingly, the disciples fixed their eyes on the sky, the heavens.
Then comes a wonderful question with implications for prayer that my granddaughter gets.
While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. They said, ‘Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven’ (vv. 10-11).
I’m not sure this is exactly what Sophie has in mind, but her prayer posture reminds me that prayer has every bit as much to do with what is around me as with what is above me, probably more. I cannot pray to God in heaven without remembering the girls massacred at their school in Afghanistan or the Russian children killed also killed at school, or the many American children who have been the victims of senseless gun violence when they ought to have been safe to grow up. I cannot lift my eyes to heaven to avert my gaze from the violence engulfing Jerusalem, not far from the place where Jesus ascended into heaven, and Gaza, where Love Must Act helps operate a nurse training program. I cannot believe God is nowhere to be found when children in Africa, where Love Must Act operates a primary school, have so little compared to how much Sophie and I have. I cannot help but see Sophie peeking and think she would agree.
Why indeed do we fix our gaze heavenward to the exclusion of God’s presence in the needs all around us? If we seek Jesus, I’m pretty sure that is the place to look around us. We will never see God, it seems to me unless we at least peek. And then act. That, after all, is how Jesus came and, I believe, will come again. Why on earth do we stand looking toward heaven without helping to make it real in the world?
Agape,
Bishop Stacy Sauls
Founder and President
Love Must Act
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