Kicked Through the Night

There is one thing that I’d like our family to lose this summer – the stomach virus. What is the point of having a family vacation if one by one by one our family is reduced to a convulsive outflow of everything inside moving quickly out. Living at the mercy of the toilet for 24 hours is no fun. But when you have to anticipate it, observe it, and then endure it, 24 hours is not the proper description for this virus.

Okay, so Nathan got it first and I held trash can after trash can for him (home). Then, my daughter coated her great grandmother’s room with it (Altus, OK). Finally, my wife greets me opening the door of our hotel with “gimme a trash can” (Quartz Mountain Lodge, Lone Wolf, OK). You get the picture. This is common to humanity.

Well, that night we were split guys and girls. My sick wife and daughter in one bed and my recovered son and me the lone wolf still healthy. It is hard to sleep with your kids when they are well (let alone ill or in a strange place). Nathan simply treated me as an extension of the bed – a pillow, a blanket, the mattress, a punch bag, a trampoline – but certainly not a human being.

I was laying there in bed and it felt like as if my spine was an escalator that he was running up to catch a connecting flight at DFW. As I felt him sprinting up my back, I thought, “he has no idea what he is doing.” We are right her as close as to humans can be and he does not know that he is making me into a human concourse. He has no knowledge that I'm here.

And then a connection flashed through my mind. I wondered about the times in my life when God is so close that I am running all over him, but I have no recognition of God all. Maybe you could say this was my "footprints in the sand" moment. Ha! These times when the separation between me and God is indistinguishable to God but completely lost to my oblivious sleep. Sure, I know, this is “all the time,” right? When we look at beautiful solid quartz rock mountains that pop up out of a flat farmland reaching for the vast blue sky, we see God. When we hear the laughter of a child squealing with delight, we hear God. When we go to a work at a job that we may hate, we thank God for a job in this sunken economy. Even when we are with out a job, in the midst of looking for work we can thank God for a healthy family. God is as close to us as our skin and we hardly notice.

My thought is that I want to live my life so in the presence of God that I am kicking him with my concerns in the middle of the night. I want to live so close to God that even my unconscious motion is affecting him. I want to live so that God indeed reigns over my waking and my sleeping, my eating and my walking. Prayer is not just for church, at the table or in a moment of desperation. Prayer is a lifestyle of seeking the presence of God. Prayer when it permeates our subconscious can and will kick a loving God who is always silently right here with you.