The Game God Doesn't Play With Me

I sat at the long wooden table the youth Sunday School class gathered around. Aside from me, our Sunday School class consisted of my brother, one of our cousins, and another girl who was a distant cousin. On occasion, another pair of brothers showed up, but the class was mainly comprised of myself and those three relations.

As I look back, I sympathize with the different adults who took on the role of teaching that class. I’m sure we appeared bored and disinterested as the teacher painstakingly asked for a volunteer to read the verses or waited in the awkward silence for someone to answer a question. Most of us were quiet, my brother was usually not happy to be the only boy in the class, and I grew frustrated with how Sunday School books asked questions with answers so blatantly obvious to the text we just read, it wasn’t worth the effort of speaking up to answer what was already printed right in front of us.

One Sunday School class specifically stands out in my mind. The subject centered around the vague topic of prayer and, perhaps feeling desperate to fill the silence with something—anything---the teacher gave an example to hopefully contribute to the lesson.

She shared the story of a woman she knew whose husband was in a horrible accident. With the doctors not expecting him to live, the wife cried and pleaded with God to spare her husband and not let him die. She sobbed out to God about how unhappy she would be without this man in her life and prayed that, although the doctors said he wouldn’t survive, that God would give her the miracle of still having her husband to live with her.

That woman's husband did not die. But he lived on many more years in a completely vegetative state, as the wife grew old trying to care for his every need.

The moral of the story, as explained by our Sunday School teacher, was: “The wife did not pray in the correct way. She should have asked God to let her husband live and recover fully, in good health. So be careful what you pray for---because you just might get it!”

I don’t know if that is where my first fear of communicating with God came from, but it is definitely one of the first memorable ones.

I don’t fault that Sunday School teacher whose intentions were probably to encourage us to go deeper with prayer, nor do I blame that little church who welcomed everyone with open arms….and haven’t we all at some point spoken well-meaning words from our hearts only to consider later those words might not have been so helpful after all?

While saying my bedtime prayers in my small pink bedroom growing up, I remember carefully trying to cross every 't' and dot every 'i' in my prayers, fervently trying to not say the ‘wrong thing’ and invoke fateful doom from a God who was listening for me to slip up one syllable.

And sometimes as an adult, I still catch myself acting as if I must explain my every desire just right to God, for fear of the castle crumbling, the other shoe dropping, or my prayer being answered---but in one of those malevolent, fingers-crossed sort of way, much like when my brother and I (and almost every other child growing up in the 80’s) would often try to agitate by saying just what the other wanted to hear, then following it with a sinister “Siiiike!”

Yet many of the disappointments in my almost 37 years have felt just like that---as if God holds out a blessing to me, and if I reach for it, if I take it, if I smile and laugh in delight at what He has given me, it will quickly be snatched from my grasp.

As I look back on the accumulation of letdowns, many from years and years past that still affect who I am today, I may never know why so many of them crumbled or why my hope was crushed so many times. All I am trying to learn right now is one reason why not:

Those desires didn’t go unfulfilled because God was “siking” me. He didn't dangle the fulfillment of dreams in my face, then snatch them away with a wicked laugh as I reached for them.

If that lesson is as much as I am able to grasp at this point in my life, this single realization will be enough accomplishment for now:

God isn’t playing “Sike” with me.