My Dad's Favorite Method for Getting Me Out of Bed
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[This is one of the posts telling a story from the life of my Dad. Click here to see the others.]
My Dad was always an early riser. Going to bed at 9:00 and getting up at 5:00 (or earlier) were normal parts of his lifestyle. In my younger days, I thought that I was a night owl because I went to bed later and slept later than he did. Now as a parent of young kids myself, I really consider myself neither a night owl nor a morning person. See, some people like to burn the candle on both ends, but I just like to sleep on both ends. Let me have my Dad's bedtime at night and also sleep past 7 in the morning, and I am one happy camper. (I blame it on being 6'7". It just takes more sleep to rest a body that's this long.)
After my Dad died, one of my brothers recounted the comfort that it was to hear him walking in the hallway so early in the morning. The sun wasn't up yet, but we knew that Dad was ready for the day whenever we could hear the sound of his boots outside our bedroom door. It's funny how certain sounds stay with us. In the last years of his life, he began to wear boots less often, and since I lived away for eleven years after high school, it's been at least sixteen years since I last heard the sound of those morning boots, but I can still hear them as if he were walking in the hallway while I'm typing this.
Since I was the youngest of three boys, and my middle brother was four years older than me, I had my high school years as the only one of my parents' sons still at home. It wasn't unusual for my Mom to travel for work, so it left quite a few mornings where it was just my Dad and me in the house. Thus, the challenge was his to get me out of bed. I believe it was during those years that he developed a simple and ingenious method for dealing with his sleepy son:
First, he would always give me a legitimate shot at getting out of bed in peace by knocking on my door and saying, "Time to get up, kiddo." That alone was nearly always insufficient for my sleeping habits, and he knew it, so he began to implement a second step after giving me about 10 minutes to get up after the knock on the door. He would turn on a radio that we had on the other side of the house from my bedroom, set it on a Spanish station, turn the volume as high as it would go, and then he would go work outside. I was left with the radio blaring en Español until I got up and turned it off.
Surprisingly for a sleepy teenager, I don't recall this ever making me mad. (Though I suppose my early morning memory shouldn't be trusted too much.)
A huge part of what made my Dad a great dad was his ability to get his point across without ever getting upset and by using as few words as possible. I need more of those skills with my kids. Instead of doing the equivalent of my Dad's method of getting me out of bed with my kids, I often resort to the classic methods of repeating instructions or trying to reason with my kids (ages 1 and 3). Of course, those just make my patience wear out all the more quickly, which then leads me to get mad, and the only thing getting mad does is make me madder.
So I'm giving up on those methods. From now on, I'll look for more opportunities to use something like the Tejano radio method of raising children.
Do Prayer and Exercise Have Anything in Common?
A really good comment from my friend Alayna (a.k.a. Paul) got me thinking about some connections between prayer and exercise. Like any metaphor, it eventually breaks down. I've never wanted to throw up after prayer, nor been hardly able to walk the next day from praying more than I should have when I wasn't used to praying very much. But I think there are some good parallels:
Whether we realize it or not, some good how-to guidance really matters. When we aren't praying, or aren't exercising, we can think of both of these activities as things we know we should be doing, and already know how to do, but we just aren't doing them. When we aren't praying or exercising, the how-to seems too elementary for us to bother to investigate: to exercise, we could just go out our front doors and start jogging. To start praying we might say something like, "Dear God, please help me..., please help them...., please help us... Amen." While neither of those approaches are the worst in the world, neither are they the best. That approach to exercise rarely makes an unfit person healthy, and that approach to prayer rarely makes an ordinary life prayerful.
On the other hand, once we begin to attempt exercise or prayer, we find that some good how-to guidance is highly valuable. For example, we find how helpful it is to have a plan, or to learn from those who have already taken the steps we're attempting to take. In exercise, the guidance helps us to avoid injuries and to stick with it when we don't feel like exercising. In prayer, the guidance helps us to shape our our prayers in ways we might not think of on our own and to stick with it when we don't feel like praying.
It's easy to avoid doing them by convincing ourselves we always do them. I have a good friend for whom I have enormous respect who used to wear a pedometer, and we'll call him Russell. (The point of wearing of a pedometer is to count how many steps you take during a day in order to quantify your level of activity, or lack thereof, in a normal day.) While it was a good thing that Russell wore that pedometer, I don't think it accomplished its intended result. Rather than attaching it to his hip, as the instructions say to do, Russell discovered that the pedometer also fit nicely onto the side of his shoe. In addition to looking a bit more stylish, this also allowed Russ to earn quite a bit of extra credit on the pedometer. All day long, as he sat at his desk (or drinking Dr. Pepper with me), he would habitually shake his foot... all the while getting credit from the pedometer for living an active lifestyle.
When we think of our main way of praying as "praying all day long," we're like Russell sitting at his desk, drinking a soda, shaking his foot and getting credit for exercising all day long. We absolutely need specific, dedicated times of exercise to be healthy, and we also need specific, dedicated times of prayer to be prayerful. When we have those specific times, we begin to find that their effects spill over into the rest of our days, and then the real experience of praying all day long comes into view for us. The times of exercise give us more strength or energy in another part of the day when we wouldn't have had them otherwise. The times of prayer help us to be aware of what God is up to in our world when we would normally have been completely oblivious.
This is the flip side of what I wrote about in A Life That Makes Prayer Come Naturally. The key in that post to prayer coming naturally for Mr. Means from the moment he awoke each day was all of the time he spent intentionally praying throughout his life. If we try to only develop a sense of constant prayer without building it on dedicated times of prayer, we may as well sit at a desk, shake our foot, and see how healthy it makes us.
It's tempting to stop short of letting them take their effect on us. Several years ago, I bought a weight set. (We disassembled it when we moved six years ago, and it's never been put back together since then.) I used it two times in one week, and suddenly I thought of myself as a serious athlete. The truth was that I was still practically as unfit as I had been before getting the weight set. The only real difference was that I was an unfit person who had lifted weights twice in a week. I may have been headed toward a more fit life, but I surely wasn't there yet, regardless of how I was thinking of myself.
It's the same with prayer. If we have two consecutive days with dedicated times for prayer, many of us think we'll soon be nominated for canonization as saints, even if we're not Catholic. However, the likely truth is that we're probably still living largely prayerless lives, though we're hopefully on the road toward living more prayerfully.
The point of exercise and the point of prayer is not what happens during the moments when we exercise or pray. Rather, the point is the (healthy or prayerful) life that those moments lead us to develop over the course of time.
Searching for Simple and Reliable
[I'm working on the Introduction to Live Prayerfully: Three Time-Proven Ways Ordinary Lives Become Prayerful. The general of the aim of the book is to provide guidance on historic practices of prayer in simple ways. Below is an excerpt from the Introduction discussing the need for guidance that is both simple and reliable, though that can often be difficult to find.]
In all of our lives, we inevitably look for guidance from others, whether personally or through books and other media. Sometimes the guidance we get is simple but perhaps not as reliable as we need it to be. For example, it turns out that “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” isn’t as true as people would have us believe. I went through a stretch of my life where I ate apples almost every day, usually dipped in mounds of peanut butter, or perhaps together with oatmeal and cinnamon sugar under a pile of ice cream, or (my favorite) in a dessert my wife makes together with gobs of cool whip and pieces of Snickers bars. I followed the advice to have an apple a day pretty well during those years, but for some reason, while eating those apples in these ways, it was in that same period of time that I went from having recently been a college athlete to hardly being able to even think about running down and back on a basketball court. The doctors visits ensued, despite all the apples I consumed. The advice regarding apples was simple, but not as reliable as goobers like me need it to be.
On the other hand, we’ve all probably also had experience with advice that is reliable, but not simple enough. If I start having car problems, I can walk into my local auto parts store and locate the thick printed repair guide for my car’s make and model. I will have no idea how to do what it says. That does not mean its guidance is unreliable, but it just is not simple enough for me.
Thankfully, though, there is another kind of advice. The best advice we receive in life, the kind that sticks with us for decades and that we make sure to pass on to our kids and grandkids, is that which is both simple and reliable. Dave Ramsey’s Baby Steps have been helpful to me and millions of others for this reason. Or, I’ll never forget sitting with my college pastor as I was preparing to graduate and had the sudden realization that I would no longer be allowed to live in the dorm, eat in the cafeteria and attend classes, but would soon have to find another way to live. As the variety of options seemed rather overwhelming to me, his simple and reliable advice was, “Just make sure you’re in God’s will today and you won’t miss being in it tomorrow.” It was simple and reliable; I’ve never forgotten it and continue to work at shaping my life around it.
From my experience, the need for simple and reliable guidance when we seek to learn to pray is just as needed as in any other part of our lives. Guidance that is described by one end or the other of the simple/reliable spectrum abounds, but guidance that is described by both ends can seem hard to find. So, after having spent quite a bit of time seeking guidance on prayer from sources all across that spectrum, my goal in this book is to pass on the some of the most reliable parts of it in simple ways. So, we will take a look at three time-proven ways that ordinary lives have become prayerful:
- Praying With Other People’s Words
- Praying Without Words
- Praying With Your Own Words
Live Prayerfully Sample Chapter: Praying Without Words
Below is a sample chapter from the book I'm working on [and the latest version of the title is], Live Prayerfully: Three Time-Proven Ways Ordinary Lives Become Prayerful. This is the chapter on praying without words. Please feel free to leave comments, and if you like it, pass it along to others. And here's a revised elevator pitch, with credits to my wife and to Robert Pelfrey:
Live Prayerfully is a book on prayer that shares time-proven guidance in fresh and relatable ways, including how we can pray with other people’s words, pray without words, and pray with our own words, as well as guiding readers into participating in each of those ways of praying.
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An Elevator Pitch for the Book
If you and I were acquaintances running into each other on an elevator and you asked me how work was going, (if it was a slow elevator and I knew we both had to go all the way to the top) I might tell you that I'm trying to write a book. This was never the case in the past, even though I've been working on it for a couple of years now. Almost no one beyond my wife knew about it before I made it public here on the blog a few days ago in an effort to try to get unstuck on the project. Even my Mom was surprised to find out about it, just as I was surprised to realize I'd never mentioned it to her. I don't intend to be this way, but apparently keeping things from people is one of my greatest natural abilities- even when I don't know that I'm doing it. So, if during that elevator conversation when I mentioned to you that I'm trying to write a book, you did the polite thing and said, "Oh really, what's it about?" I would try to respond like this:
I'm calling it Live Prayerfully: Three Ways Ordinary Lives Have Become Prayerful Throughout the Centuries. It's for people who sincerely want to grow in their attempts to pray, but, like most of us, wouldn't normally access the rich guidance passed down through history about how to build prayerful lives. Often this guidance is in old language, or academic terms, or perhaps very abstract, so I am trying to pass some of the core pieces of that guidance along in fresh and relatable ways by writing about how we can pray with other people's words, pray without words, and pray with our own words, as well as guiding readers into participating in each of those ways of praying. My experience has been that putting those kinds of prayer together allows them to build off of one another and helps the times that we have set aside for prayer to spill over into the rest of our lives, making us more prayerful people.
So now, let's say that you're not just an acquaintance on the elevator, but a really good friend whom I've said this to... what's your reaction?
PS: My wife says that this description may put some of acquaintances to sleep by the time we reach the top floor on that elevator ride. If you agree, your comment can be something like "zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz".
A Life that Makes Prayer Come Naturally
Alf Means was a hero of mine. I didn't know him very well personally, but he was a good friend of my grandfather's, and once a year at Bloys Camp Meeting I would have the opportunity to listen to hear him make an off-the-cuff comment about life with God that would stop me in my tracks. Mr. Means was a lifelong cattle rancher in a very small West Texas town (very small- the population in 2000 was 187), and my family became acquainted with his family generations ago at Bloys. One of my favorite things about going there each year is a men's meeting where everyone has a chance to say something if they wish, but special deference is always given to the old-timers to hear some of their old cowboy stories or whatever type of comment they might like to make. At those meetings, I always looked forward to Mr. Means' turn to speak, because he would either say something with his great wit or just make general comments about life that gave the rest of us a window into the soul of a man who had spent a lifetime living in a deep friendship with God.
2011 was his last year at Bloys, as he died a couple of months after Camp Meeting that year at age 91. The last comment I know of from him at that men's meeting was a great one for him to leave on. I wasn't there that night, but a friend who was there retold the story:
Apparently the men who were there that night were talking about ways that they tried to devote their days to God. Some of them were saying things like how after getting up in the morning, it's a good idea to pray that God would help them to live that day devoted to him, that for that day they could steer clear of temptation, love others well, etc. It's good advice, and we'd all certainly do well to develop such a practice.
But when it came around to Mr. Means, he said, "You know, I don't really do that. It just comes natural."
I want to have that kind of prayerful life. If I reach my 90s like he did, I want to have spent enough time in intentional prayer and soaking my mind in the Scriptures, that eventually the distinctions between prayer and the things that "just come natural" in my life no longer exist.