by Trish Ryan
“You mean, Romans 8:28?” Will would respond. “Where Paul says, ‘All things work for good for those who love God and are called according to his purpose’?”
“Yeah,” I’d reply sheepishly. “That’s the one.”
Despite my lack of Bible savvy, our small group exploded. Will and I soon had over twenty members crowding into our host’s living room on Wednesday nights, each with a dazzling array of personal and interpersonal crises besieging us, vying for our attention, and stretching our faith. My friend Kevin, who attended another church, marveled, “Let me get this straight: you’re divorced, unemployed, living in a tenement-quality apartment under an assumed name, and people are coming to you for advice on how to run their lives?” He had a point. It amazed me that so many people thought my advice might somehow help them in their situation; even more amazing was how often, when I opened my mouth to admit I had nothing helpful to say, something profound emerged: an idea or suggestion or encouraging word I never would have thought of on my own. It might not be raising the dead, but it was something.
WILL AND I met every Monday night to plan that week’s group and pray. We’d face each other on two rolling office chairs in his lab at Harvard and talk about our group. It felt a little bit like we’d adopted twenty kids, and were learning on the fly how to parent them. We developed an unofficial agreement over the course of those weeks: I pastored our group members—meeting with them for coffee, finding out how their lives were going—and Will pastored me. He spent hours answering my questions about how this Jesus thing worked—calming me down when I was hysterical about American soldiers taken hostage in Iraq or a family friend whose husband was killed in a car accident, helping me figure out one could believe in the saving power of Jesus in the midst of that kind of suffering.
“You realize, don’t you,” my friend Heather asked me one day, “that in the history of our church, every guy and girl who have led a small group together have gotten married?” I hadn’t realized. This was the most difficult part of the whole adventure for me—this undefined teamwork Will and I jumped into, leaning on each other with no architectural plan for the relationship we created. We were joined by this small group in a way that was unlike any relationship I’d ever had; after all, how many friendships involve the spiritual care and maintenance of two-dozen other people? I had no grid or blueprint for how to make it work. I just knew that Will and I were somehow supposed to keep each other afloat, and get our flock of sheep across this lake of spiritual questions we were all bobbing around in.
When I prayed about our unorthodox relationship, I always got the same picture: a television with a screen filled with static. Beyond the static, I could just make out the show playing: the NBC hit Friends. Underneath all the distracting static, I told myself, we’re just friends. That didn’t make it easier, but at least it was a definition.
On the flip side of all this angst was the rather astonishing way God showed up in our group, working miracles in our midst. They tumbled out one after another, almost too fast for us to process:
A few months after we started meeting, Amy was diagnosed with a severe colon disorder. We prayed for her for the next few days, after which her doctor called her to say, “I’m sorry, we made a mistake diagnosing your tests. Your condition is treatable; expect to feel better soon.” And she did.
Four months into her second pregnancy, my sister, Meg, showed signs of premature labor. I told her we’d pray for “Baby Lumpy” (as my nephew called the baby)—and ask God to make this pregnancy go well. We prayed that little Lumpy would settle in for the long haul and enjoy her comfy surroundings. To her doctors’ amazement, Meg not only reverted to a normal pregnancy, carrying Lumpy to term, she went past her due date. Finally, exhausted by gestation and fearful she might burst, Meg phoned me one day, begging, “Call your people off!” Two days later Lily came into the world, healthy, happy, and miraculous in that new-baby kind of way, shrieking whenever anyone dared to call her Lumpy.
We saw things like this all the time. When we prayed for Jennifer’s knee, she wasn’t just healed—she ran the Boston marathon the following spring. When we asked God to stop the pain of Pete’s chronic kidney stones, he felt them dissolve. Some weeks felt like a miracle fest as people reported what happened to them that week—family rifts healed, roommate problems solved, impossible tests passed with flying colors. Coming together on Wednesday nights was like watching the Book of Acts (the one describing all the miracles that happened as the Apostles traveled around talking about Jesus) in real life, as Jesus changed our lives in tangible ways, encouraging our faith in him and our connection to one another.
And praying in our group wasn’t some odious, mandatory chore—it was fun. Everyone brought different levels of “churchy-ness” to the group, and each of us prayed in our own unique manner: Madeline prayed in her native French when she was particularly impassioned about a subject; Keith (who was a “PK”—preacher’s kid) prayed words from scripture; Sean prayed anatomically correct prayers for physical healing based on his years studying muscular systems. The rest of us chimed in as God prompted, filling in around the edges.
“Jesus, heal Will’s trapezius,” Sean prayed one night, laying his hand on Will’s aching shoulder.
“Yes, Lord,” Kai agreed in his distinctive Korean accent. “Heal the . . . the . . . upper back!”
“Heal the latissimus dorsi,” Sean asked.
“Yes, Lord, heal the middle back—the middle back!”
“And the thoracolumbar fascia,” Sean finished.
“The lower back, the lower back, Lord! Heal it!” Kai implored. By that time we were all laughing so hard at their comedic tag-team effort, it was hard to continue.
“I’m not sure what you guys were praying back there,” Will said, “but my back feels a little better.”
We also saw personal transformations, as people came out of the various levels of pain and turmoil that had prodded them into church in the first place: a shy woman named Jane wandered into our group one night and sat right by the door, clutching her coat and purse to her chest like one of us might wrestle it from her. She could barely say her name during the icebreaker, her eyes darting around the room under a heavy cloud of bangs that obscured a good portion of her face. I wanted to reach out to her, but she looked like she might bolt if we so much as spoke in her direction. Will and I prayed for Jane after the group that night, and for months afterward. Over time she grew more comfortable and would even laugh when someone cracked a funny joke. By the time our group ended, she was an integral part of every joke, every fun event, and every group picture. Eventually, Jane headed up our church’s outreach program at the Cambridge housing projects, speaking in front of huge crowds, running her own small group, and even dressing up in costume from time to time to act out stories in the Bible to make them come alive.
Kelly came in racked with emotional pain, tormented by nightmares and voices in her head. She was overweight, hated her job, and drove a car without heat that leaked exhaust into the cabin and required her to drive with the window open all year long. We prayed for Kelly. For the longest time, it seemed like nothing happened, but we kept praying, asking God to improve her life, set her free from depression, lead her to a new job and a car that would pass inspection. Slowly, things improved. Kelly found a mentor who helped her with her eating, and she lost over fifty pounds. Her moods lifted as she caught a glimpse that more might be possible for her, and her doctors found a medication that worked for her depression. A new job opened up. A year after our group ended, Kelly walked into church and I didn’t even recognize her. Her eyes glowed. She smiled. I heard her laugh and saw a guy walk by and check her out. She was an entirely different person; a new creation, as they say.
There were also profound answers for people we barely knew. One night, a quiet girl named Gina raised her hand. This was Gina’s fourth week in our group; to my knowledge she hadn’t spoken to anyone for more than a minute. She was so skittish she looked like sh
e might disintegrate if you touched her; we were never sure from one week to the next if she’d come back. “When I first came here,” she said, “I didn’t have any friends. I was wondering why I should bother living, and even thought about killing myself but I was afraid I’d mess that up, too. I asked God for help, and He sent me here. You all have been so nice to me, I feel like maybe God wants me to live.” She smiled out at us as we stared back, stunned by her confession. Neither Will nor I had suspected that she might be suicidal; we didn’t even know her last name. Our group was so big that it was impossible for us to keep up with everyone, and the squeaky wheels were definitely the ones getting the grease. That Gina floated among us for almost a month, deciding whether or not to end her life without our noticing was mortifying; I wanted to curl up in a ball and weep with shame. But then God swooped in to rescue me from my mental self-flagellation, reminding me, But, Trish, I knew.
Oh yeah. God. He knew. That seemed like a good thing. As Gina spoke, making eye contact with her fellow group members for the very first time, I realized that it was God who made her feel safe here, who made her feel loved. Had I known what she was wrestling with, I would have freaked out—we had no training in suicide prevention, we didn’t know what she needed. But God knew, and He took care of it. That was how, I remembered, Will and I prayed for the group to operate. Sort of a Field of Dreams vision, believing that if we build it, He will come. I lifted up a silent prayer of my own, thanking God for taking care of us.
I didn’t have time to process much of what went on in our group. It all happened so fast—crises and miracles piling up on top of each other like so many unread issues of the daily paper—I didn’t have time to form a theory or opinion about why or how this was all taking place. It felt a bit like I’d landed in a secret Jesus subculture, dramatically different from the world going on all around us. But everyone around me—Paul and Pascha, Will, Amy—seemed to think that all this praying and seeing miracles were normal events in daily life with Jesus, and my reading of the Bible backed this up. So I believed them, diving into the deep end of faith again and again, trusting that someone would teach me how to swim if I got in over my head.
But still, in the middle of all these miracles, when my family or roommates asked what we did on Wednesday nights, I stuttered and stammered, having no idea how to describe this new world I’d entered. “We read the Bible a bit,” I’d say. “And sometimes we eat cake.” Then they’d look at me kind of funny, unsure why I devoted so much energy to what sounded like a Christian book club. I never quite got the hang of translating our little world of prayer and miracles into everyday language. I sensed somehow that this strange new world I’d entered had to be seen to be believed, and I wasn’t brave enough to chance the bizarre, awkward looks people were likely to give me if I admitted that my new best friend was Jesus. I needed to get used to the idea a bit myself, first. “I’m a Christian,” I practiced saying. “I read the Bible, I follow Jesus.” It sounded a little odd, even to me.
Chapter Nineteen
Forty Days of Faith
That February, I went on my first church retreat, where Pastor Dave announced an expanded version of Lent we’d undertake together in the spring: he called it “Forty Days of Faith.” For forty days, he explained, we would pray and fast together, asking Jesus to answer the deepest desires of our hearts and bless us in tangible, personal ways. Noting that the Bible is clear that God likes it when we pray specific prayers (rather than mumble vague requests that life somehow work out), Dave asked the provocative question, “What do you want Jesus to do for you?”
My answer was crystal clear—and embarrassing. While I was sure everyone around me would ask Jesus to bring world peace, that’s not what came to mind for me. What I wanted Jesus to do, more than anything else, was bring me a husband. I hadn’t asked him for this specifically before this; after our conversation in Buffalo, I figured that he knew. But now the question was on the table: What did I want Jesus to do for me? And there was only one answer.
Dave passed out sheets of paper on which to write our prayers, and I etched HUSBAND into the page in the tiniest letters possible, covering it with my hand. It felt good to admit—even if only to God—that this was what I wanted, that this was, in fact, the single biggest hope/fear/worry/dream of my thirtysomething life. I imagined a handsome prince walking through the doors of our church, making a beeline straight for me . . .
I was jolted from my reverie when Dave told us to partner up with someone, share our responses, and pray for one another. You must be kidding, I thought. The blood drained from my face as I looked around the table at all my cherished friends and thought, No way. I didn’t want anyone to know how much this bothered me, and besides—this just wasn’t the done thing in church circles. I thought back to a show I’d seen once on Christian television about singleness, led by a woman who said that wanting a spouse was like wanting dessert after dinner: sometimes you get it, often you don’t. “It’s not for everyone,” she said. “It’s not something God promises or that any of us need to survive.” She encouraged us to look to the glorious work of the Apostle Paul, how he delighted in his gift of celibacy and labored fruitfully for the Lord. If we were truly spiritual, she’d insinuated, we wouldn’t even need a workshop like this; all we’d need to be happy was Jesus. Then she smiled at us with a beatific smile, satisfied to have set us straight about what was and was not okay to ask for in her version of the kingdom of God. She, I couldn’t help but notice, was married. I wanted to rip her face off.
I knew what she meant to say: don’t make an idol out of marriage, don’t use it as a litmus test for God. I understood that God was not a vending machine or an online prayer delivery service. But I couldn’t ignore the promise in the Bible that Jesus came to give us abundant life, or the compelling stories of how God brought men and women together: Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarah, Jacob and Rebekah, Boaz and Ruth. In the book of Ecclesiastes, King Solomon even pointed out that two are better than one: “a chord of three strands is not easily broken.” That was what I wanted—a marriage uniting me, my husband, and Jesus: strong and unbreakable. I had a hard time believing that God looked at Adam and said, “It is not good for man to be alone,” yet looked at me and said, “But you, on the other hand . . .”
Slightly panicked, I grabbed Amy, the one person I could count on to humor me—knowing that even she might advise me to use this opportunity for something bigger than whining about my love life. I fully expected to be reprimanded for my selfish prayer; I hoped Amy, at least, would be kind. Dragging her off to a far corner where no one could overhear, I blurted,“IwantJesustobringmeahusbandandIwantthatmorethanworldpeaceandIknowit’snotcoolandthatitprobablymakesmeanawfulpersonbutthereitis.”
She looked at me wide-eyed and said, “Me too.”
That day, as Amy and I prayed, we felt something unexpected—Jesus’ enthusiastic reception of our request. It’s as if he said, I know this is what you want . . . thanks for including me in the process. Encouraged by this, we made the most of it. We told Jesus that if he was in charge of bringing our husbands, we had a few suggestions for characteristics our Mr. Rights might have.
“Jesus, we’d like handsome husbands,” I began.
“And fun husbands!” Amy added, grinning at the absurdity of presenting Jesus with the prayer equivalent of an online dating profile.
“Bring us husbands who are wise and loving . . .” I continued.
“. . . and sexy!” Amy added.
“. . . and single,” I finished, “with no weird habits!”
“Jesus, we want husbands who love you, men who recognize us as the wives you created for them and who think that’s the best news ever. Amen.”
“Amen.” I agreed. We closed our prayer in a fit of giggles, feeling like we’d stumbled on the holy grail of romantic happiness. For the first time in months, I was sure, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that my husband was on his way; all I needed to do was pray him in.
FOR THE NEXT f
orty days, Amy and I believed. We brought our request for husbands to God each morning (and each afternoon and evening, during every lunch break, at every stoplight . . .) waiting for Him to answer. I walked to work each morning thanking God, telling Him of my great expectations:
“Lord, thank you that you have a wonderful husband for me. I know that you’ll bring us together at the perfect time—you won’t let us miss each other or end up with other people. Thank you for our fun time dating, our romantic proposal, our beautiful wedding, and our intimate, passionate honeymoon.” I’d pause when other pedestrians passed me on the sidewalk; they didn’t need to know about my intimate, passionate honeymoon. “God, thank you for the children we’ll have,” I’d continue, “and our amazing life together. Thank you in advance for all of this—you are an awesome, miracle-working God, and you can make this happen. Amen.” Then I’d look around the train station, wondering if any of the men I saw might be my husband.
In addition to all our prayers, we fasted, as if giving up something for Lent. I fasted from coffee, Amy fasted from ice cream; we told ourselves (and Jesus) that we wanted our husbands more than we wanted a grande mocha latte or a Blizzard. On Fridays, we—along with the rest of the church—fasted from food, not eating from dinner Thursday night until dinner Friday evening. At first, this felt a bit new agey to me, one more way of modifying my behavior to try to force God to bring me what I wanted. But as the weeks went on, I saw it differently. In the Bible, Jesus talks about fasting and prayer as two parts of a greater whole, mutually dependent ways of seeking God’s presence and His favor. But God wasn’t, I realized, obligated to do anything in response to my hunger. As I squirmed through caffeine withdrawal on weekday mornings and hunger pangs on long Friday afternoons, I realized that my real craving, my real hunger, was for a relationship with the living God who cared about my life, the God who created me with this urge to be a wife and had the power to fulfill it. And sometimes, I realized, I needed to clear out all the other little stuff that clamored for my attention—like wondering what and where I’d eat next—to focus on what I really wanted, what would satisfy me for more than a few hours. The Gospels described how Jesus told a woman standing by a well, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” When I fasted, I got a glimpse of that something more Jesus spoke of, a sense of satisfaction and wholeness I didn’t find anywhere else. I started to look forward to Fridays; in some inexplicable way, they brought me closer to God. It sounds hokey. It felt hokey. But these Fridays brought me a hope I’d never felt before, a sense of partnering with God to bring about His will for my life.