4

Life Sucks.

I kicked off my sandals and carried them into the woods for a barefoot prayer walk. It was exceedingly spiritual. Gandhi-like.

A few dozen steps beyond the tree line that faces the rear of the church building, my piety was placed under review by a swarm of spiritually antagonistic mosquitoes. They enshrouded me like the hashmark cloud forming Pigpen’s dirt aura. I waved my hand calmly at this distraction as I sought to pray and center myself. I imagined this is how spiritual masters would tend to a parasitic invasion; Smiling and gentle. Now now little ones, run along.

Three or four minutes later I had descended into rigid, maniacal slapping. I’d even tried punching one particularly brazen mosquito for landing on my eye. My own blood zig-zagged down my temple as I cursed. At insects, I had cursed.

Closing my eyes I decided to pray. I sighed a resetting breath and whispered into the sylvan air a prayer to God,

“God, would you alleviate the annoyance of these mosquitoes so that I can focus on you? Amen.”

A harp-strummed breeze blowing the bugs away at “amen” would have been a nice touch. Or suddenly coming across an abandoned can of Deep Woods Off. Nothing like this happened.

Wiping my brow of sweat, blood and the disappointingly low body-count mashed against my scalp, I walked on resolved and re-centered. A sage in the forest.

The mosquitoes followed. Scads of new recruits joined the cloud as if God had gotten my request exactly backward.

I persevered. I was Bruce Banner, keeping my rage at bay, waving restrained, ineffectual swishes into the air as the swarm strafed my ears, their high voices taunting me.

I have walked this path dozens, maybe hundreds of times. Often the day after preaching, to wonder if I meant everything I said. I’ve spent hours on these leafy paths asking God to give me the maturity I lack, to show me what to do about the ongoing challenges in all my relationships, where I’ve told God to address the gap between what I am and what I want to be. I’ve said the words out loud. I’ve thought them, too worn down to hear myself say the same crap to heaven again. I’ve written my prayers in my journal and have been amazed how, years later, my petitions are identical. God, why do I still not have better relationships with family, friends? Why do I feel like a fraud? Why am I not developing spiritually? What must I do………?

Weeks before I’d caught a turtle in our church parking lot. She appeared to be relocating to our church’s retention pond from some other secular pond in the neighborhood. When I picked her up to take her to the water I noticed that she was covered with leeches. Twenty or more, attached to every soft spot on her body.

It was clear she needed my help and the leeches needed stomped into the pavement. Out of selective compassion I pulled the leeches off her one-by-one. I then gently placed the anemic little reptile in the water where she swam away, a bit low on fluids but free of parasitic oppression.

Later that same evening I felt two small bumps on my waist, right at my belt-line. A closer inspection in the bathroom revealed what appeared to be a couple of eight-legged watermelon seeds. Ticks. Both of them were dining uninvited on my insides. I had apparently brushed up against some foliage while dealing with the turtle.

Then I saw my scalp in the bathroom mirror. It was riddled with bites. Dozens of them, pink and stretched tight. The mosquitoes has employed a sneak attack as I’d tended to the reptile.

One of my children had picked up lice at school that week. The stigma is worse than the reality, but the reality is bad enough. Bugs trying to live off my child without consent. My wife had spent several hours making our children lovable again.

I stood looking at myself that night, the mosquito pimples on my head, red freckles where the ticks had been, the fine-toothed comb on the side of the sink that comes with the lice removal kit, remembering the leeches adhered to the turtle. An unscientific hate was simmering in me.

At one point in the delousing with the special lice comb, my wife had asked in exasperation,

“Why would God create lice?”

Typically I prefer questions about simpler things like the Trinity or capital punishment. I don’t pretend to know why God would see fit to make parasites if God only had, as the story goes, six days of making. Though many of us love God’s creation, we hate these particular members with righteous disgust.

After some thought I shrugged my shoulders at Kristi’s question. Who knows why God gave these damnable things life?

Weeks later on my barefoot prayer walk, that unanswered question was still hanging in the air with the mosquitoes.

I couldn’t recenter anymore. My piety and my veins had run dry. I was back to wishing there was a way to murder these insects slowly, painfully. The whining cloud circling my head began to obscure the sun. I’d started using my sandals as weapons, slapping them together as I walked and cursing at their twisted corpses. At insects, I was cursing.

Gandhi wept.

I gave up and started back for the church, furious at the universe. I had set out to pray after all, not rob a bank or kill dolphins. Pray. My motivations entitled me to at least a squirt or two of heaven’s Deet.

Where prayer is concerned I long ago stopped expecting, let alone demanding, to hear an english speaking male on the other end of the line. I don’t hear God speak. But that moment, barefoot and seething, was one of maybe two times in my life I felt like maybe I had.

“GOD!” I demanded as I swatted spasmodically, “If I am to take you seriously, why can’t you do something as simple as relocate these mosquitos?”

In response I heard,

Because I want you to never forget how loathsome it is to live life as a taker.