For Wilshire Baptist Church
On a recent Tuesday evening I went to talk to our neighbor two houses down about the vacant house between us. The owner is renovating it and getting it ready to sell, and the fence he promised that separates our back yards is finally going up. After our chat, I was going to continue down the street and meander through our neighborhood or maybe to Central Park, which would be normal if LeAnn were with me instead of at the weekly meeting of Wilshire’s minister of music search committee. But when I got to 10th street and looked toward the right, my eye caught the corner of the labyrinth at First Presbyterian Church and that’s where I went.
The labyrinth is the same size and design as ours at Wilshire, but instead of being laid out in graceful arcs of cut and polished stone, it is rendered with rough pavers from the local home improvement warehouse with crushed rock between the pavers. Still, it’s a perfectly sufficient labyrinth and I always wonder aloud when I’m there why I don’t wander over there more often.
Anyway, I stood at the opening and recited the Lord’s Prayer as is my custom, and then I prayed my way to the center, paused there on the flat cross to watch the last of the sunset, and then I prayed my way out to the opening again.
At the risk of breaking Jesus’ commandment to pray in private, I’ll tell you:
I prayed for peace — in the world and inside my own head. I negotiated with God that while 64 is a pretty good age, there still are some things I’d like to do and I think another 25 years ought to be enough to get it all done.
I prayed for the search committee that was meeting at that very moment and prayed for their peace and courage and their understanding that this is God’s selection as much as theirs and they are really just there to help make it happen.
I said prayers of thanksgiving for medical professionals who are doing what I could never do on my own and who are doing it with such enthusiasm and love. And I thanked God for family and friends who have provided support, encouragement and prayers that I haven’t been able to say on my own.
I prayed for our neighborhood and especially the unknown new neighbors who will one day share the street and the fence with us. And when I got back to the opening of the labyrinth and turned to face the cross, I did what our pastor Timothy Peoples tells us to do every Sunday: I exhaled.
It was a quiet night and the labyrinth is away from traffic, and the only person I saw was a man with a long gray beard on a bicycle. As he rolled around the corner, he saw me and asked, “They haven’t started falling yet, have they?”
“No sir, they haven’t,” I replied and watched as he rode down the street. I didn’t understand his question or my answer for that matter until I was walking away from the labyrinth and crushed an old pecan shell with my foot. I stopped and looked, and of course, he was talking about the pecan trees surrounding the labyrinth. My answer was correct: the pecans haven’t fallen yet; that happens in October. Maybe he was just pulling my chain, but maybe from his vantage point my wandering in circles looked the same as it does on fall days when folks walk around under those trees looking for pecans.
Whatever, the pecans aren’t even forming yet and won’t be visible for months. Likewise, my prayers have just been lifted up and there’s no timeline for when and how the answers will fall. But they will bear fruit as surely as the trees will drop pecans on the ground in October.