My wife Lucy and I enjoy going to Pacific City on the Oregon coast. The Nestucca River bisects the town as it flows into Nestucca Bay. A little upriver from the town is a bridge. Standing on the bridge at different times of the day, you can watch the water flowing one way or the other, depending on the cycle of the tide. It reminds me of my relationship with God in prayer. Prayer is conversation, not a monologue. Sometimes it is quiet like this view of the Nestucca. Sometimes it is dramatic, like another river view that I enjoy. Portland Women’s Forum State Park at Chanticleer Point is a couple miles east of the town of Corbett. It is the first view point on the Columbia Gorge Scenic Highway. The view there always takes my breath away. One can only see upriver, but that may be all that is needed at that moment.
When I was a student at George Fox College in the 1970s, I went with some other students to attend worship at Multnomah Monthly Meeting. I don’t remember much except this: A man named Ben Richmond, a member of that meeting and a worker with American Friends Service Committee, prayed out loud with power. In that moment, I glimpsed the power that prayer holds to change things, to change me. It took my breath away.
Sometime after that, I was on break and visiting my family in Idaho. My father was a civil engineer, who ran his business from the basement of our house.
My mother was office manager, secretary, bookkeeper, and typist. They had about twenty people working for them at that time. My mother typed all their paychecks on a standard typewriter.
One week, the day before pay day, my parents came upstairs, visibly agitated. “We don’t know what to do!” They said they had no money to meet the payroll. Their accounts-receivable balance was healthy, but all the people who owed them money were unable to pay that week. I don’t remember ever seeing my father upset like that before. He was sweating. He asked me if he should go to the local loan shark, so that he could pay his employees, who lived from paycheck to paycheck.
By that time in college, I had experience with unprogrammed waiting worship and had participated in some experiments in prayer led by Richard Foster, author of Celebration of Discipline and Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home. I said the only thing that came to me, “We can pray.”
I ushered my parents into the living room, and we all sat down. I said we should begin with silence. During the silence, I began to see a strong picture in my mind – my mother typing those paychecks. We agreed that she would go ahead and prepare them. We would see what God might do.
The following afternoon, Mom was just about done typing when one of my dad’s clients walked in the office door. This man was a prominent businessman in town; he usually had big projects in mind or in progress and sometimes needed my father’s technical expertise. He handed my mother a check for $5,000, enough to meet that payroll! My mother jumped up, hugged him, and declared, “You are an answer to Prayer!’ He was taken aback and said, “Well Hell! I’ve never been called that before!”
Sometime after my graduation from George Fox, I was back at my parents’ house. I was getting some training and became a part of the household again. (I was a “retread” before that term was coined.) My father had become an invalid, crippled by rheumatoid arthritis. He nearly died from rheumatoid lung. When he got well enough to do some things, he joined a conservative Christian men’s group that was visiting people held in the local jail and giving out Bibles. Dad asked me to go with him to one of their meetings. I can’t remember much about that meeting except for the way that it ended with prayer. About a dozen men were present, and they prayed one after another. As I listened, it dawned on me that each man was repeating what the guy before had said, careful not to miss any of the required topics and phrasing. It sounded like a formula.
So, not long after that, I cornered my father. I asked him, “Is prayer a conversation with God?” He answered without hesitation, “Yes!” I pounced, “Well if it is a conversation, shouldn’t God get to do at least half the talking?” He was silent, but after that, something seemed to have changed in his jail ministry.
Dad was especially tender toward young men in juvenile detention. Eventually, he got involved with Prison Fellowship, which gave him access to a larger prison population. The prisoners nicknamed him Yoda because he didn’t speak often, but when he did, they listened carefully for his wisdom.
One of Dad’s coworkers in Prison Fellowship wrote a poem for Dad’s funeral, describing this memory: One day, Dad didn’t feel well enough to make the regular visit to the local juvenile detention. One of the other men in the group giving the Bibles tried to talk to a fellow they had met before. The young man told him to go away, “I only want to talk to the man with the crippled hands.”
My father didn’t have all the answers, but he learned how to listen.
Sometimes, we might find ourselves thinking, “I should have enough faith to pray for the ultimate good I am seeking – a personal healing, restoration of a broken relationship, etc.” Sometimes, when we can’t find enough faith in ourselves, we quit trying. Perhaps instead, we need to keep looking for the place to start; imagine finding a ford or stepping stones.
I was part of an unprogrammed worship group in the late 1980s. A young couple in the town had a child who needed an organ transplant, and the situation was deteriorating. They got desperate and asked our group to pray for them.
Five of us went to see them. One fellow had been reading Agnus Sanford’s The Healing Light, which inspired him to try praying for healings. There was a couple who had been missionaries in Latin America and were charismatics; Bill and Irene Cathers who with their children were my spiritual foster family. The fourth was a wonderful woman minister, recorded in Oregon Yearly Meeting in the 1930s, named Esther White, who I call my spiritual mother. I considered all four of these Friends my elders in the Faith; without any of them, their love and their prayer for me, I would not be alive to write this account.
We sat down in the young couple’s living room. The child’s mother cried, “Why does God allow this?” Our prayer time was almost silent except for the missionary couple praying in tongues half under their breath. My hands got hot as I imagined light flowing into that little one.
When Esther sensed we were done, she stood close to the young mother, took the child in her arms, and spoke a short, tender, compassionate prayer. There was nothing else to say, and we left.
Sometime later, we learned that the child’s condition had gone into remission. A donor was found, and the transplant was successful. The child was thriving.
The folks in my Meeting like to sing, “Shall We Gather by the River” from the Friends Hymnal. That version has this phrase, “that flows BY the Throne of God.” I find it beautiful, but I grew up with a bit different wording: “that flows FROM the throne of God.”
A week after I was accepted into membership at Bridge City Friends Meeting in Portland, my wife Lucy was diagnosed with cancer. I was frozen with fear. I could not pray. But many people were praying for us, people from around the world, family, friends, and Friends from the various branches of the Society.
The Friends in Bridge City Meeting wrapped us in love. They were God’s hands, feet, and arms to steady us. The feeling was visceral. I told Lucy that it felt like we were being carried on a river of prayer. But I was unable to feel faith myself. I could only think that if the worst happened, and I lost Lucy, I would be left to raise a child by myself. My ears were dull to any word from God. But one day in the hospital, Lucy said, “God told me I am going to live, and we are to start a reading group!”
Somehow, I believed her even though I couldn’t. We had been given a task to do in our distress. As Lucy began her recovery, we opened our home to a group reading Nine Pastoral Sermons of George Fox: That Thy Candles May Always be Burning. Some folks light a candle when they feel the need to pray. The message of Early Friends is that the candles are lit inwardly by God and are always to be burning. Or to return to the river theme, “that flows from the throne of God”
I don’t believe in any formula for prayer. As George Fox might have said, prayer is “something we come to know experimentally.” As the Apostle Paul assured us, the Holy Spirit can pray for us when we don’t know how. And as Jesus said, prayer doesn’t need many words. It is mostly about listening rather than speaking. Prayer is an essential part of hearing and obeying what we are given to do – and somehow given the strength to do.
Dan Davenport is active in the work of the New Foundation Fellowship, a group dedicated to keeping accessible the message of Early Friends, perhaps best summed by George Fox, “Jesus Christ IS Come to Teach His People Himself.” He is a member of Bridge City Friends Meeting (NPYM).