and God
At the end of Adam’s dinnertime prayer—thank you, God, for lemon chicken; thank you, for green beans, always specific gratitude for the foods he likes to eat and complete silence on the foods he doesn’t, uttered in his deep, pausing voice over our table, our steaming plates of food, our linked hands–tonight, Riley carries on, her voice rising.
And God, please help Damar Hamlin get better; please let him continue to live; please help his family and his friends. Please allow him to breathe, to wake up, to eat.
Immediately, I think of all the Twitter posts I’ve seen this week from people with strong connections to this man, how so many of them urge us all to keep praying. Immediately, I think of Paul, who, when it comes to prayer, urged us to never stop. This is how continual prayer happens in community, a voice carrying doggedly on just as another falls silent.
Always, Riley talks to God with the kind of faith that simply trusts in His willing attentiveness, the kind of faith that never asks for less to make a yes feel more possible. She will pause while walking across a room and flick her eyes heavenward to say aloud, Oh, and I forgot to ask you: When can I drive a real car? In fact, I expect that the longer the injured football player, who suffered a heart attack on the field, remains in intensive care, the more direct she will become with God about her petitions. Please will shift into when, and I suspect that for Riley, it’s not that she doesn’t understand the sovereignty of God, but that she also firmly believes in His omnipotence. She knows He can, so she prays boldly and honestly, with unceasing expectance that He will.
All week, reporters on Damar Hamlin’s situation have reminded us that Mr. Hamlin is not just a football player. A TV spokesperson double-underlined this, punctuating the statement with nods of his head, saying something like, “He’s a human being, and this is about his life.” Of course, I need these reminders that people are always more than the context in which I encounter them or the service they perform for me, but Riley hardly needs those notes.
Riley enjoys watching football, which has been a recent surprise for us. She loves keeping track of the scores and cheering and reporting on wins and losses, and over time, I’ve learned that this is true because of her deep love for people, because she recognizes the players on the field as people who are worthy of love and attention. She learns their names, and routinely, she feels crushed over their injuries, reacting viscerally the moment she hears that someone has been hurt. It is a heaping measure of God’s grace to Riley that she excels in empathy, even though that’s not a quality those who subscribe to classic stereotypes about Autism would expect to find in her. She rejoices with those who rejoice and mourns with those who mourn.
On Monday night, I sat ensconced beneath a blanket with a book in my hands and my reading glasses perched on my nose while Kevin watched a few minutes of that NFL game between the Bills and the Bengals. When Damar Hamlin went down, I heard Kevin first, a foreboding oh no, and looked up. Kevin tried to explain, rewound the video so I could see, and then Riley walked in fresh from the shower, her hair wet and dark and hanging over her ears in thick, wavy hanks.
“What happened?” She asked, reading the concern on our faces, probably having heard the phrases of our alarm and disbelief drifting up the stairs and down the hall. As we explained, she stood there in her t-shirt and starry-sky pajama bottoms, staring at the TV screen, taking in the ambulance and the video of Mr. Hamlin’s teammates and friends, of players on the other team, crying and hugging and praying and pressing their bodies together to make a wall of privacy around their injured peer, and her eyes flooded.
“Oh no, that’s terrible,” She said, her face solemn and glowing with TV light as she finally sank into a chair at the bar in the kitchen, her hairbrush still dangling, ignored, from one hand.
In the end, we had huddled up in our living room to pray, just as we pray tonight, for a 24 year-old man we don’t know and a family we don’t know, a family we imagine now weary-slumped in a hospital waiting room, where they will fold themselves into awkward chairs and eat lukewarm fast food and try to make burdened conversation while they wait and keep watch. That part at least, we understand, having spent our own time in such places, wearing our own disoriented, shell-shocked faces.
Riley had come to the dinner table late tonight, right before Adam’s prayer, and so she still stands, praying for Damar Hamlin, one hip jutting toward the table, her hands still stretched out toward Kevin and Adam, her fingers fluttering in front of them as she speaks, caught and unable to gesticulate. Her voice wavers with genuine feeling, tender, bruised by the knowledge that someone else is hurting.
All day, she has checked periodically for updates, calling out to me from her bedroom, her desk, her chair in the kitchen, reading me whatever article pops up first. Sometimes she has finished a paragraph and commented parenthetically, softly to herself, well, that’s good, and I have looked up, drawing my hands out of soapy water or away from my computer keyboard or out of the folds of a clean, warm towel, and, feeling touched to have been trusted with someone so loving and kind, have paused to wonder,
Why Lord, would you give her—precious, beautiful her–to someone like me?
