Teach Her to Pray with Open Hands

Baby wouldn’t eat the other day.  

She woke up early in the morning and screamed and screamed, 

but wouldn’t eat, and nothing would console her until she finally just cried herself back to sleep.  

I woke her in the morning to try to feed her, but she wouldn’t eat.  

Again an hour later, and an hour later, and again.  

Finally at 12 o’clock, nearly 12 hours since she ate last, 

I sat with her in my lap 

and I told her about that verse in Isaiah…

My friend spoke quiet, this strange new combination of my old friend and a mommy: skirt, t-shirt, bare feet, curled up on a couch, but face alive with a story of God, and love, and hope.  I kept myself in anticipation of the verse she would describe.  What did she tell her baby? 

“Sometimes God wants us to be sick for some purpose, 

and maybe He wants to teach us something, 

but this verse says that Jesus came to take our sicknesses, 

so let’s ask Him, baby, to make you better.” 

So we prayed, 

and an hour later she ate just like normal, 

she ate very well, and she hasn’t had any trouble since.

I don’t know how to do it, but I want to teach her to pray with open hands. 

This friend, more than any other, makes me cry.  Something about God’s work in her goes deep into my heart and makes me ache with the goodness of it.  He has taught her to pray, to dare to ask, to dare to hope, to surrender it all in the same prayer she asks with. 

I hear some of her prayers for her daughter.  I know that God has given some of the prayers, and I trust He will answer them.  There is a fire in her, and her husband with her, to raise their daughter in what God is teaching them: faith that is humble, determined, kind, hopeful, surrendered.  I hope I get to know this little girl as she grows up, because I want to be friends with her: a girl who has known these truths about God from such a young age, who will, by God’s grace, be a rare young woman.