“Dear God, be good to me,
Thy sea is so wide,
And my boat is so small.”
—A Breton Fisherman’s Prayer
One Sunday in March, the tremors pulsing violently on my brain made my hands go limp. My head listed like a ship without ballast. It nodded with my whole body. Sitting in the church pew was especially difficult that day and so I wandered downstairs, making my way slowly along the rail. The church service was muffled above me as I shuffled to a seat in a corner and rested.
When I knew the sermon was winding down, I rose and began the long climb up to the sanctuary. My halting steps, one after another, slowed with each stair. At the top of the flight, and in plain sight of many people, my foot caught and I lurched to the floor. I pushed myself off the ground before anyone could come to my aid and put on a good face for those who looked concerned.
It worked. They turned to hear the sermon’s close while I trembled in my shame. Shame. Brokenness. Insufficiency again. I worked my way to the rest of the family and heard nothing for the rest of the sermon except the persistent whispering of my shame. I ate and drank the sacraments, but the whispering continued.
At the end of our service, the congregation stood with hands raised to sing the Gloria Patri. I stood too, albeit with difficulty. I raised my hands with the rest. And I sang with them: “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, for ever and ever. Amen. Amen.”
As I stood there with them and sang the words, I realized quite vividly that three-hundred empty hands surrounded me. My hands were empty too. All our hands raised to God in a profoundly worshipful gesture, as if everyone under that homely ceiling were saying together, “We offer up to you, O God, everything we have: nothing. We are empty bowls. Fill us.” As my children and I closed with the double “Amen,” the whispering stilled. For just a moment, my shame was swallowed up in that worshipful quiet. For just a moment, I forgot myself–though the tremors had their strangle-hold on me–and bravely raised my shaking, empty hands. “I am an empty bowl. Fill me.”
When we arrived home, moisture thickened the air. Snow, dirty and hard, still covered the ground but the day was warmer and more welcoming than those dreary February days now past. I wanted to sit in it. I wanted to be alone, to tremble in solitude.
I gestured to one of my daughters, asking with slow effort that a chair be taken into the backyard. She gladly took the closest one, a simple red dining room chair we had bought at a garage sale years earlier. She set it out in the shallow snow, a ways from the house. Then she returned to guide me out the door like an invalid, walking step by slow step with me until we were at the chair. She made sure I was securely seated before returning to the house and leaving me to my silent mental staggering.
I sat down and let bewilderment cover me like a suffocating sheet. I stopped fighting the darkness and vast wilderness around me. I stopped hiding from frailty because I couldn’t do it anymore. Nothing glorious or revelatory happened. One day I just realized I had nothing left with which to fight. Like a moose stuck waist deep in the snow, I was helpless. How easily we forget how much mental strength is required to argue, to complain, to kick against God.
Although I had stopped fighting, the built up pressure in my mind and soul was palpable. The questions of identity burned inside me, a physical weight I could no longer carry.
Who was I?
Why was I?
Why such grief?
What to do? What to do? What to do? I wanted so badly to have something I could do. But I had no strength. I could not hold more than three words together at a time. Every time I tried to string together an extended thought, the words slipped off my mental tracks like a train disappearing over the cliff. I felt again the islanding effects of grief.
Suffering is personal. Although a community, a family, an entire people group might face the same loss, each member must taste the wormwood on his own tongue. The bitterness is individualized, tailored for each of us. A mystery.
This bitterness I was tasting prompted so many feelings: dread, apathy, anger. So many concerns rose inside me. For two months I had dragged my little red wagon loaded with existential questions right into God’s inner chamber where I flung them at his feet. One by one I pulled them out and raged at God. I pounded my fist. I kicked the questions across the floor. I demanded an answer. And I received one, day after day, after day, after day, but not in words. I received it in the small pressure of a divine finger in my mind.
Tremors.
How much longer?
Why such grief?
Lord, hear my prayer!
But that day, sitting alone in the chair, I had no strength to compose elaborate cries. Sapped. Sagging in body and mind, I meekly uttered three words:
God. Help. Me.
I said them over and over and over in my mind.
God. Help. Me.
God. Help. Me.
God. Help. Me.
Nothing noble. Nothing complex. Nothing astute. Nothing but me and my need stated frankly and simply. I have since wondered if, perhaps, this prayer is the most elemental of all prayers. Perhaps this is the most indispensable form of any petition. It communicates the essential nature of our human condition: we are destitute. Every other prayer that rises from our hearts, certainly mine, takes some form of this one.
So I prayed, for once unencumbered by false motives. Neither vanity nor greed pissed in the well of my intentions. Nothing but me, naked, before God. And I was empty. Not simply an empty vessel, but broken and empty.
God. Help. Me.
“Lord, my heart is not haughty, nor my eyes lofty. Neither do I concern myself with great matters, nor with things too profound for me. Surely I have calmed and quieted my soul.” (Psalm 131:1-2 NKJV)
With quiet all around, with my head bobbing and my hands limp on my lap, I pleaded most childishly: God. Help. Me.
Then, everything around me changed.
Snow. So uncommon that late in the year, snow began to fall around me. Massive flakes drifted down in slow motion–unhurried, without a care in the world. Within moments, a fresh blanket covered all the crusty old snow around my feet.
My cry for help continued, muffled now by the complete stillness which accompanies fresh snowfall. God. Help. Me.
Like Jonah,
“I cried out to the Lord because of my affliction, and he answered me.
Out of the belly of Sheol I cried, And you heard my voice.
For you cast me into the deep, Into the heart of the seas,
And the floods surrounded me;
All your billows and your waves passed over me…
The waters surrounded me, even to my soul;
The deep closed around me;
Weeds were wrapped around my head.
I went down to the moorings of the mountains;
The earth with its bars closed behind me forever;
Yet you have brought up my life from the pit,
O Lord, my God.” (Jonah 2:1-4, 6 NKJV)
I wept. No call for help–just quiet weeping. The snow, like manna, piled around my feet. Manna settled on my head and caressed the tip of my nose. Manna, soft and clean, melted on my outstretched tongue. And I felt something I don’t believe I can explain in words: the presence of God. He was with me and there was weight to him. His tangible presence banished panic from my mind, leaving only peace.
Now I know that God is always present. I’ve known that since I was a little boy. But I do not think we feel his presence very often. I certainly had not until that moment. Perhaps I am too spiritually blind or perhaps God chooses to make his presence known only at particular times. Whatever the case, with the tremors in full force and all my hopes for health, control, and strength dashed, I suddenly felt peace.
Unexplainably. Surprisingly. God was with me, fulfilling his word: “Listen to me, O house of Jacob, and all the remnant of the house of Israel…even to gray hairs I will carry you! I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry, and will deliver you” (Isaiah 46:3-4 NKJV).
I had chased peace my whole life. I found it in my brokenness.
I found it by sitting still.
Strange indeed to find peace at the end of my rope, but Christ promised this long ago: “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your heart be troubled, nor let it be afraid” (John 14:27 NKJV).
Finished, the fighting relinquished, my little red wagon of questions slowly disappeared beneath the snow. I finally sat still. Listening. At peace.