marginal accretion

Latest Post

Providence and Prayer

This happened.

Twenty years ago I lived in my first studio apartment in southern California in a run-down neighborhood. The apartment had thin walls and cockroaches. I worked swing-shift by myself running a plastic blow-molding machine, making about 800 polycollars (some kind of plumbing device) per night. One night I came home to find a bombed-out car, still smoking, in front of the apartment complex. My immediate neighbor was a woman with burn scars all over her face, who liked to stand naked out in the hallway smoking cigarettes, and would rush back into her apartment when she saw me. I slept on an old couch (it was a “furnished” apartment) across from my two huge bookcases filled with Calvinist and Reformed theology books, the sum of my possessions. I listened to KFI talk radio. I did not own a television, and the internet had not taken off as a cultural phenomenon yet, so I didn’t even have an e-mail address.

I had stopped attending any kind of church, though I was fresh from working at a Bible College. I had been terminated for being a Calvinist. I had yet to discover the Orthodox Church. I decided, however, to pray that providence would arrange for me to help someone in need at least once a day. As it turned out, about once a day I would find somebody in need and assist them. Many people needed gas, or their car jumped, or the guy just out of jail who I took to Dennys, etc. The prayer was being answered, but I thought to myself, “This isn’t necessarily being arranged by providence. I am just unconsciously actively looking for people to help and making myself more available.”

So one night I decided I was just going to forgo the whole experiment, drop my a convenience store, buy some beer and get drunk. After work I stopped at the first convenience store I saw, where I had never been before, and went in, grabbed a six-pack of beer, and took it to the counter.

The guy behind the counter hung up a phone, a stricken look on his face. “My wife just left me,” he said.

“Oh no,” I said. I got out my wallet.

“I can’t believe it,” he said. “She just called and told me she had packed and is going out the door this minute.”

“That’s terrible,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

He put his hands down on the counter, trembling, and began to talk, and I began to listen. No one came in the store, and for about thirty minutes he told me all of his troubles. Since this is a true story, nothing miraculous happened to give it a sense of closure. The guy and I did not become friends. His wife likely left him and he was likely miserable, although hopefully my presence for thirty minutes as a listening ear was helpful. I was overcome with Protestant shame and did not buy the beer, but that is not the point of the story (I bought a gallon of Diet Coke instead.) And although I’d like to say from then on I never doubted the reality of providence or serendipity or synchronicity or again, but I did.

Moreover, for some reason, after leaving that circumstance of working nights and living alone, I quit the prayer of helping at least one person a day. Maybe I’ll start it up again.