Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep

The first prayer I learned as a child was likely the same one you learned too.

Now I lay me down to sleep.

I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

If I should die before I wake,

I pray the Lord my soul to take.

I love listening to children pray. They have an honesty and innocence that cannot be matched by people who have to pay taxes. Additionally, they haven’t yet learned to concern themselves with the opinions and judgments of the mortals who are eavesdropping on their conversation with God, so they don’t feel compelled to toss in a few “Thee’s” and “Thou’s” to gussy up their prayers. No, children just open the doors of their hearts and let it all come flowing out of their mouths, sometimes to the chagrin of their parents. Some of the prayers of children spoken in my presence that would definitely make the greatest hits album include:

The one where my youngest son Kase prayed for everyone around the table and everything on the table….well almost everything. His prayer was something along the lines of, “Thank you for mama and daddy and brother and mamaw and grandaddy and chicken and macaroni and rolls and sweet tea and I don’t like green beans, amen.” Listen, if there’s ever a time for brutal honesty, it’s in a prayer.

There was also the one when I was holding a gospel meeting and was invited to a family’s house for dinner. The table was loaded with incredible foods and surrounded by a very sweet family, and the youngest was called upon to bless the food. Much like my youngest son, he gave thanks for everything on the table and everyone around it…well sort of. After marking macaroni off the gratitude list, he started giving thanks for his “parents, brothers, sister, and then….and then….and then……that man right there I don’t remember his name, amen.” It didn’t hurt my feelings, I’m pretty sure the Lord knew he was talking about me.

My favorite prayer of all, is actually the simplest prayer of all. I love listening to children pray because it is just basically repeating thank you over and over again. Many a bedtime prayer with my sons included an inventory of thank you’s for every toy, stuffed animal, friend in class, lunch lady, family member, and pet in their little world. They reflect on their lives, and all of the things that populate that life, and they are grateful for it all…except for maybe the green vegetables.

Think about the way children pray compared to how most adults pray. Children say thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, and grown ups tends to pray give me, give me, give me, give me, give me. Even when we don’t pray gimme, most of the prayers I have heard led by adults in my lifetime sound an awful lot like modern country radio….the same handful of cliches repeated over and over in a different rhythm. Checklist country songs are a broken record of revolving topics — trucks, dirt roads, blue collar roots, small town Friday night, and either an open field or creek bank — and the same can happen to prayers — guide, guard and direct us, bring us back at the next appointed time, bless this food to the nourishment of our bodies…everybody sing along. I’m sure you know the words. As an admitted grammar nerd, the one that always makes me chuckle in church is, “Lord, be with those who are sick of us.” Whenever I hear this one prayed I imagine my high school English teacher breaking out the red pencil and rewriting, “Lord, be with those of us who are sick” — misplaced modifier! Seeing as how the Lord invented humor I’m sure He grins every time He hears it too.

Let me interrupt this broadcast to bring you a special message from my heart. I am not judging the way people pray and I promise I’m not critical of people while they pray. I think the most important ingredient in prayer is sincerity, but I can’t help but notice that we tend to get stuck repeating the same handful of phrases and words that we heard the older men at church and our daddy’s using when they prayed. In no way am I demeaning this or anyone’s prayers. What I write is purely observational for the purpose of making us think, and to learn to laugh at ourselves. I don’t do so proudly, but I will readily confess that prayer is arguably the weakest part of my own personal faith, one that I have to focus on constantly. I was never formally taught to pray, so I was just kind of left to pick it up as I went along by listening to the people around me pray, and I bet the same was true for you. Ok, back to the lecture at hand.

Every church has that one man everyone loves to hear leading prayer. Usually that means he is focused, confident, and eloquent, using enough big words to really sound like he knows what he’s doing, but not so many that we don’t know what he’s saying. He correctly says, “Be with those of us who are sick” and maybe even switches it up with a “Be with those of our number who are sick.” Somewhere around paragraph two of the prayer he will begin tossing in a few of those really fancy Bible words like righteousness, justified, and sanctification, using them to garnish the prayer the way your grandma used the expensive cheese to make that “fancy five-cheese macaroni” at Thanksgiving. Not to mention he uses uses thee, thou, and thine, so you know he means business. We all like hearing that guy pray because it just sounds like what a prayer is supposed to sound like to us, and secretly we are a little envious. Again, I’m not seriously knocking anyone’s prayers. I think the world needs all the prayers it can get right now, even the ones that sound like a Shakespearean soliloquy. Lord knows I do.

In recent years, my favorite “grown up” prayer leaders have little to do with polish and eloquence and a lot to do with intimacy and transparency. I love hearing people praying who sound like they know God personally, like on a first name basis, like next door neighbors, or better yet, like they grew up together. When I was in preaching school an instructor told me of a conversation he once had with a Jewish rabbi on a plane. The rabbi’s observation of the Christian prayers he’d heard was that they sounded like they were talking to a stranger. At first I was offended, but then I payed attention. Another Jewish rabbi, long ago, said the truth will make you free….but first it will make you mad. The rabbi on the plane wasn’t entirely wrong, and that’s why the way some people pray stands out to me. They have an intimacy and familiarity, a vulnerability that bursts forth the thoughts and intents of my heart the way a drill taps an oil well. Even though I’ve only known a handful of people in my lifetime who pray like this, I have access to these types of prayers every time I read through the psalms. The prayers in the psalms are like an atom bomb of emotion, full of power and pain and going in every direction. If the prayers of the psalms are anything they are honest, sometimes brutally so. In an effort to access this part of my heart I spent much of last year praying the psalms personally. Admittedly, it was difficult at first because it was so foreign to what I had grown to know as prayer. In time, those psalms began to bring to the surface long buried and forgotten feelings, like priming a well.

Lying in bed last night I thought about all the types of prayers I could pray, and decided to settle on the first, simplest, most child like one I could recall.

Now I lay me down to sleep.

I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

If I should die before I wake….the last two days of my life would have been arguably the best ones. Thank you for letting me spend the last two days on our family farm, surrounded by my wife and parents and my sons and the girls they are making a part of our family. Thank you for letting me cook tomato gravy for breakfast with my mama and grill steaks for supper with my daddy. Thank you for letting me go Mother’s Day shopping with my wife and daughter-in-law. Thank you for letting me sit around a way too big dinner table in a way too little dining room with my family after painting the deck with all seven of them. Thank you for the memorable sunsets, the gentle breeze, the dark green grass and trees and the explosion of color in the flowers. Thank you for letting me get to see my sister in law and my nephews, and I’m thankful that the three year old knew I was talking about The Dukes of Hazard when I called him Rosco P. Coltrane. Thank you for letting me eat three meals on the deck, help daddy with the tractor, and spend hours just talking with him. Thank you for letting me spend time with both of my sons, together, and one on one. Thank you for Levi being baptized a born again farm dog with swims in the pond and the creek. Thank you for sending my sons someone to love. Thank you for grilled hamburgers and Sun Drop and Jade’s perfect homemade chocolate chip cookies. Thank you for stories about when my mama and daddy were dating. Thank you for the ride home with the windows down and the day ending on the front porch drinking Abita root beer with the love of my life. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, and I pray that thou wouldst be with those who are sick of our number.