I tend to think of seasons as four separate compartments to the year. Like nesting boxes in graduated sizes.

I forget that they are more like the Lego blocks in my son’s latest creation. Interlocking and overlapping. Difficult to pry apart.

Recently, I stood over the sink and ate a peach. It tasted perfectly peachy, and the juice ran in rivers down my right arm. Like a sunset, melting.

I held the fading summer sun in my hand, and watched gray clouds hauling themselves briskly across an autumn sky. Yellow leaves somersaulted across the grass.

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peaches on paper

 

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I also tend to think of prayer in separate compartments. Like the paper trays I keep on my desk.

There is the inbox and the outbox. There is a spot marked urgent and one for the less pressing overflow.

If I think long enough, I can assign each prayer a neat label. Answered. Unanswered. Ongoing. Expires in five days. The paper trail of prayer is clearly defined. Requests move in one direction. Responses in the other.

But of course prayer is nothing like my paper tray. Of course, of course, I tell myself. Of course it is so much more like standing in a chill autumn wind while you hold summer in your hand.

The truly astonishing thing about prayer is not that our prayers are sometimes answered. The thing that never fails to startle me, to wake me up and scatter the paper piles of my mind, is that even the prayers themselves are given.

First, the prayer like one falling leaf.

Then, the answer, like the taste of that sweet peach.

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On Friday, I breathed out the heaviness of the whole week with the thought It has been a long time since someone prayed for me.

That sort of thing was once a regular occurrence. I lived on a cushion of tightly knit community, and I rarely went more than a week or two without someone reaching out a hand. Someone holding out a prayer.

But two cross-country moves in four years have disrupted so many once-regular things. And every so often I let myself feel the jagged edges. Every so often I lean into them and breathe my own jaggedness.

Which is one way I know to pray without ceasing.

On Saturday a friend drove thirty minutes to come sit on my porch. While our children played, we talked.  And we prayed.

She reached out her hand. She gave me her prayer.

I responded, with surprise and with gratitude, Amen.

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Which came first? Like chickens and eggs. Like seeds and flowers. Prayers and answers are a puzzle I hope I never solve.

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