(Warning: coffee- and sleep- deprived post; read at your own risk!)
Our parish has a door to door
evangelization team to rival that of the local Jehovah’s Witnesses! Okay, no, we don’t. I’m just kidding. Our team is much smaller, only goes out once
a month, and is much, much less annoying.
They just go out in teams of three to different neighborhoods. One person does the talking, the second team
member writes prayer requests down, and the last prays for both the team and
the people they are visiting. At each
house, a simple question is asked:
“How can we help you?”
I’ve been out with the
Evangelization Teams only once. That
time, I misunderstood the schedule and arrived at the church hall a day early
for a discernment talk, only to find myself caught up in an E.T. meeting. On a spur-of-the-moment decision, I figured I
would go out with them that day, and I did.
After being paired with two older women and taking up the position of
Pray-er, we drove to a neighborhood of about twenty houses and began knocking. The majority of the houses we visited were
empty, their occupants out a-visiting themselves on that rainy Saturday. Nevertheless, a few persons came to the door,
and were asked our question.
“How can we help you?”
We never specified what sort of
help. We’d do anything for them,
spiritual or menial. Change a lightbulb,
fix a Rosary (it was a beautiful Job’s tears Rosary), get Father to bring them
communion, etc. However, the majority of
people understood us as asking if they needed prayers. Their responses generally ran like this:
“Nope, I’m good. The family’s good. No one’s sick.”
Or
“Well, there is this girl that
lives over-the-way and she has leukemia.
Can you pray for her?”
Now, as nice as it is to hear of
other’s care for the sick, and as cheering as it is to know that a family is in
good health, I noticed a trend in these answers that soon unsettled me, not
least of all because I recognized them in myself. Why is it that we only ask for prayers when
we are in trouble, especially illness or other things too large for us to
handle on our own?
I’m not certain why I do
this. If I am brutally honest, it is
probably because I am too independent. I
harbor the mindset that I can handle things; I’m strong, and smart, and
completely capable of taking care of myself.
Besides, God helps those who help themselves, right?
Wrong. Not only is that verse not in the Bible, it
is completely inaccurate. God wants us
to come to Him like little children. And
what do little children do but come openly, with humility, for *all* of their
needs? Not just the big ones, but *all* of
them. A toddler turns to her father to
have her teeth brushed. An infant turns
to his mother for *everything*. Children
are not independent; they are needy, with an expectant, trusting sort of
need. God wants us to come to Him like that.
Perhaps our hesitation to come to
God with anything but big troubles is because we think we have nothing else to
tell Him. What is my joy over a new job
compared to that girl-over-the-way with leukemia? What is my joy over my puppy compared to the
loss of that child whose mother overdosed?
Okay, God wants the small things.
But surely He doesn’t want happy things.
He has more grave concerns, more troubled people to help, than my quite
contented self! This is an
understandable mindset, from our own point of view. I mean, if you had a choice between listening
to someone squeal over a bunny, or helping a person in a car accident, which
would you choose? However, I think this
mindset, this perspective, misunderstands the nature of God.
God doesn’t need to choose. To say that God cannot pay attention to “this”
because He is busy doing “that” is to forget that God is omnipotent and
omnipresent. He has more than enough
mental capacity and attention span to listen to *everything* anyone could ever
bring Him. God can never be too busy for
each of us individuals. Furthermore, and
to put it all in another light: if you only went to your friend when you needed
something big from them, would you consider yourself as having a good
relationship with them? I wouldn’t, and
the fact that I do this with God reflects pretty heavily on the sort of
relationship I have with Him, I think.
We act as though God is available
for a limited amount of time, and we save that time for Bad Things. We think as if we believed that God is a last
resort, only to be called when we can no longer handle the situation. We pray as if God is only interested in our
troubles.
I call this the “God Is Only in
Hospitals” mentality, and I am very guilty of it. So, today I pray for the grace to always
remember that the small things are never too small for God, and that He does
not want just my sufferings, sorrow, and trials, but my pleasures, joy, and
peace.
