ask for what you want
Rain falls outside, a whisper of sound, and looking out the window, through drops like tiny diamonds on the glass, I soak up a saturation of breathing green, the thickness of leaves and wild, dazzling grass.
Glancing back toward my phone, the Bible app open, my finger paused on a phrase, I wonder what it must have been like for King Solomon, dreaming that real dream, to hear God urge, ask for whatever you want, as if He who knows every inch of Solomon’s heart and mind—of mine–doesn’t already know the answer to that.
Rain falls, and every time, I remember something Jesus said about the rain falling on the just and the unjust, how as a kid with no appreciation for the rain I always thought this meant that bad things happen to everyone. Funny how the years improve perspective, how God grants wisdom to those He loves. Even before I heard a favorite teacher point out that the original audience counted rain as a precious gift, in my adulthood I came to understand this to be so, having experienced that nothing grows—not even me—without water to soften the soil and quench the thirst, to break that relentless, parching heat. Lush, that’s what we call a well-watered land, using a word that even sounds like rain to describe the fruitfulness of such a place, the leaves on its trees unwithering. So really, Jesus meant the opposite idea, that God bestows His kindness generously, on everyone, according to who He is and how He loves, rather than in response to human behavior.
Similarly, in my younger days, I mistook this story—the one below my finger about God and Solomon—as a primer on asking correctly. It can be easy, in looking to do well, to miss a primary emphasis on the character of God. It can be easy to miss that in its first few lines, this text purposefully notes some of Solomon’s sins. And then God invites, ask for whatever you want. So, the writer begins with the note that God is generous—He just is.
I watch the rain, wondering, then reach for my journal to pen down the runneling question, making it a prayer–
Instead of pointing out Solomon’s egregious imperfection, God—instead of pointing out mine, you would first teach us to pray as children on your knee, leaning into our tiny, crescent ears to whisper, just, ask for whatever you want.
It’s an indulgently doting invitation from a recklessly generous father.
You’ve heard it said, maybe, that the father in that prodigal story, prodigal meaning unreasonably extravagant, was more prodigal than the son who gained the well-known label.
Surely there is something to be learned about God in those later verses, when he responds to Solomon’s request for wisdom, but first only this, that Solomon’s God—and mine–is the God Jesus spoke of later, that so He has always been, the God who treats everyone generously to His kindness, even those who are evil or ungrateful.
Just a few steps away from where I sit, mulling the rain and God and His magnanimous invitation, hearing in all of this some deep echo for myself, another loving father interrupts his preoccupied, autistic son, relentlessly coming again to draw him into a deeper relationship. It matters very little that Adam stumbles, reluctantly, almost all the time, over how exactly to respond, that he is impatient, wanting to push aside the real, lest it distract him from his distractions. Love is enough to endure all that.
“Hey, what are you looking at there, buddy?” I hear Kevin say, and then the scrambling, frantic sound of Adam simultaneously navigating away from whatever screen captivates his attention, tapping buttons quickly to turn down the volume, lest his father see.
no no no no no—
That quick staccato refusal, the sound of resistance, most primitive of messy, often wrong hearted, human articulations, comes, gasped and grunted, as Adam’s only answer to Kevin’s curious, engaging question, and although I can’t see Adam’s face, I hear in his voice the sound of shock. It is the sound of a child who has been caught in folly. It is the sound of my thudding heart sometimes, when I would prefer to hide the truth.
In my stomach, a deep sinking ache, and then, a hand reflexively lifted to shelter my eyes from what I do not know.
I do not want to know.
There has always been this prayer of mine about guarding Adam’s innocence, me knowing I can’t shelter him completely, and now Dorothy Parker jumps into my mind with her what fresh hell, because certainly for Adam to shrink away so guiltily there must be some grave-deep rabbit hole he’s fallen into on the internet. Adam still laughs uncontrollably over cookie monster clips on YouTube, so where, I’m wondering, how, could he possibly have wandered where his tender heart should feel so suddenly naked?
“Oh Adam, let me see,” Kevin says, gently. “I’m just curious about what you’ve found.”
From my corner of the couch, I hear the click of keys, and, distracted now, I’m listening—
“So, you found Soak City,” Kevin says, and I hear the smile, broad and delighted, in his voice. “Well, why are you hiding that?”
Every day now for the last few weeks Adam has been counting down to our family’s next big city baseball adventure, coming to find me or turning to me in the car just to say how much longer, just to talk about one of his Big Three Joys, and now, it seems, he’s finally found what Kevin had found months ago searching it out just for him, a combining of Joys. The same big city we’re traveling to for baseball has a water park.
Something about their exchange, Kevin’s and Adam’s, something about my son trying to hide not shame, but childlike love, delight, the Joy his father knows better than just about anyone and would sacrifice to give him, brings me right back to Solomon. Something has been bothering me about Solomon’s dream, some flat resistance of my own whispering, no no no no no, as my finger hovers over God’s words, and I return to it now, with a question.
If this is God’s call to prayer for me also—ask for whatever you want, do I have the guts to make an honest prayer, even though it exposes the childishness of my heart?
It’s back to this again, me wondering if, when I pray, I’m trying to be right or trying, just honestly, to be me, broken as I am, in need of God?
I don’t know about you but reading God’s words to Solomon—ask for whatever you want—launches a thousand wary sermons in my mind, some of them from others, some entirely my own, about the right and wrong ways to pray, but not very many of them, if any, honestly, have very much to do with the honesty of the praying, sinful man, who cried out to God for mercy and of whom Jesus taught, “this man alone went home justified.”
Most of my personal, internal sermons on prayer have everything to do with justifying myself, about being careful to pray the right ways about the right things, as though this, more than my childlike faith articulating an utter need for God, will be the thing that pleases Him.
Maybe Solomon’s prayer delighted God not because Solomon answered correctly, as if the invitation itself were some kind of test, but because, as Solomon says when he replies, he recognizes first that God is kind, has always been kind, and that relative to God, he, Solomon, is a but a little child. Solomon’s request for wisdom comes in honest acknowledgement of his need for God, his desire for more of God above all else. To ask for wisdom, God’s chokmah, is to ask for God.
I hear it plain in Kevin’s tone, an amused bewilderment that after all this time, Adam could still be trying to hide who he really is and what he really loves, that after all this time, the son still doesn’t know how much his father just loves him, just loves to give him good gifts. Adam hasn’t quite figured it out, that his father is kind and generous. He just is.
“I wonder what it is,” I venture aloud, looking up again from my phone, talking to Kevin before he even wanders back over to my side of the room, “that makes it so hard for us to believe that God loves us, that He loves our joy? Sometimes I think I’m so busy trying to pretty up my prayers I’m not being honest about the truth, messy as it may be, that God already loves knowing about me. You know?”
Kevin heads toward me now with a second cup of coffee, smile blooming slow.
“Yeah, I think maybe I do. Just a little bit.”
