Goodbye, Hello, Promise

Change is Hard, Love is Right Now

The twins were still babies when I was so desperate that I sent away for a prayer cloth from a televangelist. My husband was unemployed, and the rent was due. My old washer had given up. With four kids, two in cloth diapers, somebody in our house always needed new shoes.

Intellectually, I knew that sending away for a scrap of cloth from a dubious source was folly. But when you skate that close to catastrophe, you need to believe in miracles, no matter how far-fetched. I couldn’t wait until my magic prayer cloth arrived so that finally—finally!—God could make my problems go away.

I doubt I’m the only one who has ever been taken in by wild promises, especially when made by guys on TV. The intro used to croon, “Something good is going to happen today.” If you sent a few dollars, that is. I hated thinking God was that transactional, but like I said, baby needed new shoes and a washer that could still handle dirty diapers without dancing across the floor.

When my official prayer cloth arrived, I was mildly disappointed. The little scrap fit inside a short, not legal-sized envelope. It was white cotton with light blue edging. Blue being St. Mary’s color, I thought maybe this embellishment was trying to draw in a larger audience of fools.

I set to praying right away, running my thumb along the blue edging. I must have looked like I was fingering a rosary of sorts, so I glanced over my shoulder to be sure my anti-Catholic father wasn’t scowling from the Great Beyond. I squinched my eyes shut and prayed so hard that one of the kids asked if I had one of my headaches. Well, yes, I told that child. Being penniless does that sort of thing. I passed around juice boxes and went back to my prayer closet which doubled as our bathroom.

And of course, exactly nothing happened. Until everything happened.

I’m thinking about this little memory as I try on the new widow’s clothes I get to wear. Everything has changed. I’ll be working to make my shroud fit for the foreseeable future. I don’t know how to be a widow. But here’s the thing. Way back when I was clutching a mail-order prayer cloth, I kept hearing, “Let go.”

At the time, I was irritated with God for not just showing me the answer (and moolah) I’d been pleading for. God knows I wasn’t asking for a private jet like some of those evangelists on TV. No, all I needed was enough to get by. A job for my better half. Some way to keep my oldest boy from using the toes of his sneakers as bike brakes. But all I heard was, “Say goodbye to what was. Say hello to what is.”

Today, I wonder if I need to hear this again. The Love who never changes tells me that life IS change. There’s Jesus, standing on a grassy knoll, beckoning me to follow. But I can’t follow without letting go of what was. And what might be sounds pretty dang scary. Only what is, right now, remains.

Oh, sure. All that sounds peachy unless you’re facing the abyss of grief. The anxiety of not enough. The loneliness of feeling unloved. A thousand other terrors grab at your ankles every damn day. And most of us (me!) don’t think we’re worthy of care unless we send money to get a little magic in the mail. We don’t want to believe in a transactional God. But we do.

That’s the American way, after all. And we Americans have a really tough time letting go of anything—our stuff, our opinions, our nostalgia for the good old days. Most of the time, the stuff we covet disappoints us in some way, but we’d rather cling to the past than to acknowledge goodbye.

Change is freaking hard. I know it, you know it, God knows it. The only way I can manage change is by hanging on to Love. The One who is Love may chuckle at my stupid prayer cloth, but is always ready to envelop me in compassion and mercy.

Today, something in your life will surely change. Sometimes for the better, sometimes not so much. It’s up to us to throw off our pasts, quit worrying about tomorrow and settle into what is. That’s where God lives, where love lives, where all the miracles live. Right here. Right now.

Back in my Prayer Cloth Miracle phase, nothing especially miraculous happened for way too long. I bit my cuticles into a bloody mess in my worry and supplication. I was on the edge of burning the cloth when, out of the blue, a great-aunt I hadn’t seen since childhood called. She helped pay the rent and bought me a brand-new washer-dryer set.

I think God was really showing off, but that incident taught me not to fear goodbyes. Rather I could see that God had it all along, that all I’d lacked was faith to know that His eye really is on the sparrow. I don’t need a prayer cloth after all—God’s Love assures me that even through big changes, God is always saying, “Hello!”