This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2015, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Editor's note • Robert Kirby is on vacation in Ye Olde England, where there's no Internet. This is a reprint of an earlier column.
My mother taught me how to pray. She didn't teach me what to pray for. I learned that on my own. The earliest prayer I remember occurred in junior Sunday school. Sick with fear, I stood at the lectern while Mom whispered the words in my ear.
The rules said I should keep my eyes shut, but I peeked. My friends snickered and pointed from the back row. So, even though my mom whispered, "And we're thankful for our many blessings," in my heart I said, "And please kill Leon and Duncan."
Nothing happened. My first public prayer was also my first indication that it didn't work exactly the way I was taught. Sometimes God answered prayers, but most of the time he didn't.
You can argue that silence from God is a perfectly acceptable answer. I say try that idiot logic on your boss, wife or the bank and see what happens.
A little harder to debate is that I might be praying for the wrong things. I have done that a lot. In addition to Leon and Duncan, I also prayed for a bike, tiger, rocket ship, machine gun and for my fourth-grade teacher to explode.
Though couched as pleas, all of those prayers were actually demands. It took years for me to realize that God probably doesn't like being ordered around, so I moved on to wretched bargaining.
Offering to behave myself for the rest of my life if God would take care of the police, the draft, Bobbi Bennett's older brothers, and the failure of a 1970 Camaro to hold the road in Emigration Canyon didn't work either.
Because I had all of those things coming, it now seems a bit disingenuous to have pleaded with God to help me get out of them. Heck, they were probably his ideas in the first place.
Not having much success communicating with God, I stopped doing it for a long time. There was, I insisted, no point in having a one-sided conversation, no matter how important they said it was in church.
Besides, I'd listened to church prayers and hadn't learned much either. Most of the time, they were deliberate attempts to circumvent the point of life.
"Please take us home safely" is a common prayer buzz-phrase where I church up. It's a nice thought, but life isn't safe and — here's a secret in case you haven't been paying attention in Sunday school — it's not supposed to be, either.
What kind of lesson would there be if we got everywhere safely, or if God automatically smoothed the road ahead of us just because we were too wimpy to handle it?
When I pray now, I try to remember to give God some room to work. Fortunately, I got a lot of that. I ask him to change me instead of life, to help me be a little more understanding. If he also wants to throw in a fully loaded jet fighter, I won't complain.
Robert Kirby can be reached at rkirby@sltrib.com or facebook.com/stillnotpatbagley.