Let It Not Be So

Last Sunday, on the way to church, we found my daughter Charlotte's dog Tessi—the mother of the lab pups who were born in my first post—dead on the road. There is a longer, more distressing version of this story that I won't tell here, involving the family coincidentally being in two cars and us all seeing the body separately and separately concluding that that the fur was the wrong color of brown to be Tessi, and then my husband leaving the girls and me at church while he went back to verify that it was indeed our poor dog. In fact, he never really was able to recognize Tessi from her remains—the accident that had killed her had been too brutal, too complete—but he could see that the dog was female and that she had recently whelped.

Anyway, back at church, before the girls and I knew—or, before we accepted that we knew—I prayed a prayer that had occasioned two dog miracles in the past: Let it not be so. My daughters were praying the same prayer, I'm sure, as was my husband, as he looked in vain for Tessi's collar and then went home to change his clothes and fetch a black plastic bag and then returned to the scene of the accident. Let it not be so. Let it not be so. Let it not be so. As I prayed it, though, I felt pushing up through my words a different prayer, a prayer I didn't want to pray, a prayer I rarely pray unless made to do so, typically at church, and even then not usually in much earnest: Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

What a scary prayer. You are praying against your own interests, for one. And, invariably, if you are sincerely acknowledging God's superior will in a situation, then you know things are bad, really bad, not as you would have them at all, and not likely to change for the better. Thy will be done is a pitiable, last minute plea for order, for sense, it seems to me. It is a prayer that means, Oh Lord of heaven and earth, let there be some good reason for this misery, this evil suffered, even though I can't see one. Once you pray it, Thy will be done repels all lesser prayers for help or healing—especially the mindless, hopeless, breath-holding prayer of Let it not be so. As such, it also relieves you, I suppose, of the tense burden of hope in suffering—the hope that keeps you from embracing pain and truth and thereby, perhaps, getting past their attendant terrors. But Thy will be done is—for me, in any case—the hardest prayer to pray and mean it, whether for a child's dog or for a friend with cancer or some other trouble or for the victims of some atrocity you read about in the news. I’d so much rather just pray the familiar Let it not be so, which takes me on the slow road around my mountain, than enter one of the dark faith-tunnels that hurtles one straight through to whatever unknown safety might lie on the other side.

In any case, someone else’s will was done than ours, this time. Tessi was dead, and we were left to console ourselves with the obvious violence of the accident, which allowed no time for suffering. And with the fact that Tessi had managed to wean her nine pups before she left us. And with what fine pups they are, just now learning to climb their pen and plop, fat-bellied, to the yelping freedom of the yard and the fields beyond.

But Sunday morning at church, in one of those ironic fiats that God seems to enjoy, when I could hardly listen to the sermon for praying my prayer and my daughters’ prayer and my husband’s prayer, the pastor preached on the power of corporate prayer. He made reference not only to the Lord’s Prayer—focusing especially on the line that had by then made it to the back of my throat—but to one of those alluring promises of Jesus’s that seems to invite us to desire that our own will be done: “if two of you on earth agree on anything you ask for, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three of you come together in my name, there am I with them” (Matthew 18:19-20). And so I was left to reconcile, as always, the sovereignty of a God who thunders, “Where were you when I made this world?” and whose will is done, willy-nilly, with the love of a parent who wants to give his children good things and has granted me countless miracles in the past, many of which I probably didn't even notice.

I am also left with this bleak question: Could it be that the two or three passage is not about the granting of our corporate requests at all but about the futility of our ever agreeing, simultaneously, on what’s important? I mean, perhaps we get so busy praying Let it not be so that we can’t recognize, much less agree to, the larger prayer for life that begets all prayer.

The puppy miracles my family has witnessed in the past—a broken leg miraculously healed, a congenitally non-existent eyeball restored to normalcy—have moved us closer to that life, I think. We saw and believed, at least temporarily. When I spoke of one of these miracles in church, though, a friend of mine was offended. His wife suffers a debilitating illness from which she will eventually die. Why, he asked, would God heal a puppy and not a woman who had been prayed over and prayed over earnestly, by droves of friends and loved ones for years?

I was ashamed of my family’s little miracle, then. Of our sometime need for answered prayer to document and prove God’s love. Were not puppies themselves proof enough? Or daughters? Or the white winter sunshine last Sunday morning? And what of my friend’s complaint? Why no healing there?

I have no answers, no deeper knowledge of the ways of God than this: It will be as he wills it, but he loves us, crazily, with that single-subject doting of the most besotted mother. It seems a puny answer, though, this riddle, to assuage a young daughter’s loss and a friend’s years of fruitless petition for healing.