Prayer is just focused thinking.

Your own mind is generating both sides of the dialogue, both the problem and the solution.

Even as a child I realized this, and yet I’d still sometimes fall prey to the allure of prayer. I’d find myself wanting to mimic the type of religious prayer I saw so many other kids my age performing, which was less of a deliberative and meditative communion with God, and more of just a loud, focused wish:

“Dear God, please help me get better grades and please feed the hungry children in Africa and help Meemaw be able to finally leave the hospital and also I’d like a kitten and a horse.”

I’ll admit, I loved any time an adult would ask a kid to pray out loud for the group, because it gave me a chance to see just how truly terrible they were at it. Religion was silly and pointless enough already, but it became even more so if you decided to purposefully misunderstand it at every turn.

I mean… Who wouldn’t like to pray to God each day if you your prayer could just be a giant wish list? If you could just rattle off a bunch of things you’d like to have? That isn’t much different from sitting in Santa’s lap at the mall, is it?

Unsurprisingly, this approach to prayer is universally appealing, and it’s not just children I would see pray this way. At other kids’ houses, I’d watch entire dinner table prayers devolve into little more than the parent simply saying what they’d really like to say to their child:

“… and God, please help Tom to hunker down and focus on understanding his algebra homework and stop hanging out so much with that Peterson girl, who is distracting him and not even all that pretty. Amen.”

Sometimes people would end their prayers like they were wrapping up a Miss America Pageant speech:

“…and please God help us to end world hunger, and stop famine, war, and poverty, and have peace on earth for all mankind, thank you, amen.”

Any time someone ended their prayer in an unrealistic way like this, with a catch all bid for God to end the grand sum of all human suffering and global catastrophes, it at least made me hopeful they didn’t really expect to get that horse or kitten, either.

Still, it wasn’t really the preposterous or unrealistic nature of the Wishlist-Prayer format that I found unappealing. Growing up, no amount of skepticism can compete with the idea that a God exists in the sky simply to do your bidding and grant your wishes, and so I’d have fleeting moments where I’d try to convince myself I was a believer, too… if only so I could participate in all the grandiose wishing. I didn’t want a horse, per se, but I did want a baby grand piano.

Is this how I go about getting it? By begging God for it?

I wasn’t so naive as to think that God was going to buy me the piano— that was absurd— but based on what I was seeing other families do, I did see the logic in stating what I wanted out loud. In the same way telling Santa what you wanted was really a way to communicate to your parents what you’d like for them to buy you for Christmas, I could see the efficiency of talking relentlessly to God, in public or at dinner, about the piano I wanted.

If Tom’s dad could finagle his opinions about who his son was dating into his prayers, then I could certainly work the piano into mine. It felt contrived and manipulative, sure; but so long as we all know exactly what we are really doing here, who’s it really hurting?

If public prayers and dinner prayers were just polite ways of communicating our deepest desires to our friends and family, then I could get behind that. What a novel contrivance! Prayer is a speech you give that enables you to politely beg for things or communicate how you’d like for others to behave, but without having to crassly ask for it outright! With the perfectly chosen words, you could even work in a bit of posturing, as well as some self-aggrandizing signals about what a fantastic and moral person you were. All of this sounded great.

However, before I could succumb to the undeniable allure of the Wish-Prayer, there was one final barrier to entry for me, one final hurdle to overcome before I could wholeheartedly participate. And it was the cold, hard fact that humans are not the only ones who can purposefully misunderstand the intended purpose of a thing: Gods can play this game, too.

Gods, Leprechauns, and Genies.

Putting what I knew to be true about the malevolent and vindictive Old Testament Christian God aside, I grew up surrounded by other horrifying stories of wish fulfillment gone awry. In our household, the television was God. And in the 80’s, with shows like The Twilight Zone and Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories, there were enough fictional (but still very prophetic) tales going around that the maxim “Be Careful What You Wish For” was ubiquitous without ever having to crack open a Bible.

Even though I can’t specifically recall whether it was a genie or a leprechaun, I will never forget a television episode where these teens capture a magical being. They hold the creature against its will until it agrees to grant them three wishes. Well, as is the case with all these types of stories, the wishes backfire due to a lack of specificity… and everything goes horribly wrong.

One kid wishes for x-ray vision, so that he can see girls’ tits through their shirts. But what he gets instead is not the ability to peek at girls’ fleshy bosoms. No, he becomes incapable of being able to see flesh of any kind. The leprechaun/genie turns his eyesight into the kind of vision you get from an X-ray machine at the doctors, and suddenly now all the boy can see is a disorienting world of heat maps and skeletal structures, and he is incapable of turning it off.

Another boy wishes that his mother would do everything he tells her to, and he gets exactly that. She does everything he asks of her, to the letter, but she does absolutely nothing else. If he isn’t there giving her instructions, she just stands there in the middle of the room like a powered down robot. She won’t even feed herself or go to the bathroom without a directive to do so. It’s a nightmare, and not at all what the boy wanted. I found this scenario particularly unsettling.

Many other similar stories are coming to mind where a genie tricks his temporary master into wishing for asinine things. Genies clearly love it when people wish for things that will ultimately be their own undoing, and the takeaway always seemed to be that wishes come at a price. You should always find a better, more self-reliant way to make things happen for yourself.

This mentality of wish trickery was so pervasive that it began to sully any intrigue I might have had about joining the rank of praying people, as now all I could see was giant gaping holes in every prayer.

You wanted God to feed the hungry children in Africa? Well, you never specified that you wanted Him to eventually stop! So what if he continues to feed them until they explode?! Or, more likely, since you didn’t specify where the food should come from, He’ll probably just take it from another population, and plunge a new group of people into hunger and destitution.

You wanted your grandmother to finally leave the hospital, yeah? But you never said you didn’t want it to be in a body bag! I bet you anything now she’ll be leaving the hospital because she’s dead! And if you ask for a horse, what if it’s not a real flesh and blood horse that you get, but a metaphorical Trojan Horse? Something you didn’t expect and didn’t really want?!

In fact, the trickster answer to any prayer or wish seemed to be a veritable Trojan Horse, and I came to believe that unless your prayer was airtight, God was going to find a way to purposefully misinterpret your prayer. He was going to give you something that might look good at first and appear to be just what you prayed/wished for, but ultimately it was really designed to teach you a lesson.

And I would go so far as to say that the lesson here was not even just “Be careful what you wish for,” I reckoned that God’s lesson would be a bit bigger still. Based on what I knew of the Bible, I suspected that God’s lesson would be a reminder that prayer should never take the form of a gratuitous wish list in the first place.

So, to recap, not only was I reluctant to pray because I felt that people were purposefully misunderstanding its purpose and using it in a manipulative and/or shamelessly greedy way, but I was now obsessed with the idea that God was going to ruthlessly attempt to misinterpret my prayer at every turn. He was going to try and poke holes in it every chance He got and give me some unwanted nightmare.

Unless I was careful.

And careful I was. Huge chunks of every day would be spent not in prayer, but in listing off caveats and addendums to one single prayer. I can recall countless bike rides around the neighborhood that would last for hours longer than intended, just because I wasn’t done listing off all the provisos and qualifications that applied to my one original request.

My mental prayers more closely resembled legalese than anything else, usually sounding like the kind of disclaimer that might follow a binding legal contract. I was obsessed with trying to make my prayers airtight and leave no room for misinterpretation or trickery.

“God, please grant me a grand piano. And I mean grand in the traditional sense, not a piano that is so grand and large that it won’t fit in the house. And don’t give me a piano but then take away my ability to play it… like, I don’t want it to collapse and crush my fingers on the very day it arrives, I want to be able to play it just the same as I have always been able to.

“Well, not the same, I want to continue to grow and get better, I don’t want to be forever locked into the same ability level I’m at now… I want to eventually be the best piano player in the entire world!

“But hold on, I don’t want to be the best because of some bizarre scenario where every other piano player in the world has had their hands chopped off… or some situation where I can play beautifully but no one else can hear it because a virus or something has turned the whole world deaf, and music has become obsolete…

“I also don’t want my parents to buy me a piano they can’t really afford and then we have this piano but no food to eat and we’re all starving… but I also don’t want a piano that was obtained by ill-gotten means, or one that shows up seemingly through serendipity, but really comes with a set of conditions or causes us to be indebted to another person... I want no strings attached.

“Oh! But hold on! I see what you’re gonna do here! You’re gonna take this literally and give me a piano with no strings inside! So, hear me when I say this— the piano needs to be fully functional, and have all its literal, instrumental strings attached, just no figurative ones.

“And on that note (haha, pun intended), it needs to have all its keys and all its legs and all its pedals and… let’s see… what else…

“Oh, yeah: Don’t give me a fully functioning piano that is dangling from a crane ten stories up in the air, like in one of those cartoons, only to have the cable snap a few seconds later and come plummeting down and crush my grandmother to death… or anyone, really… I don’t want the piano to show up in tandem with someone else suffering or dying. The piano can’t crush my Mamaw, or my Nanny, or my mom, or my dad, or my piano teacher, or my friend Jenny, or…”

And then I’d just spend the next hour mentally listing all the people I didn’t want the piano to hurt.

At the end of all this, of course, I’d almost always come to the conclusion that never in a million years would I be able to imagine all the infinite possibilities for misunderstanding my original prayer, nor would I be able to protect myself from all the different types of trickery God might have in store for me, so I’d inevitably end up calling the whole thing off.

I’d end my prayer beseeching God to please ignore my original request, and I would state very plainly (in language that left no room for interpretation) that my original wish, our original contract, was heretofore null and void.

“I do not want the piano. I relinquish all claim on said piano and disavow my original wish for one. I repeat, God, ignore my request for a piano - grand or otherwise - and I will figure out how to get it without your involvement. Thank you. Amen.”

***********************

To be totally honest, to this very day, I still find myself doing some version of this, even as an adult. I’ll catch myself accidentally wishing for something, then the rest of my bike ride around the lake will be spent making mental amendments to a simple, singular, offhanded wish.

“Hold on now, when I just wished that the crew would hurry up and finish pouring the concrete foundation for my house, I don’t want them to do it in a hurried, sloppy way, like… at the expense of proper technique and integrity or something … I want them to do it right, so scratch the “hurry up” part. Oh, and also…”

You see, the mentality of prayer as a way to request things from God has forever been ruined for me. In my mind, prayer is— and always will be— a way for God to trickily punish you (especially if your prayer isn’t airtight), and he will usually do so in the most creative and ironic ways possible.

Sometimes I wish that people would learn to pray properly, or that I’d never been exposed to people mangling prayer in a “Request List” sort of way in the first place. Or that I never started equating it with the deceitful manipulations of genies and leprechauns.

"Ugh, did I just say the word wish? Oops! Sorry! I don’t actually mean that, God, I don’t want you to go back and change my childhood or alter the past to remove certain events or memories… that would be terrible and could go wrong in so many ways! I want to keep my life the same as it is now!

"Well, not “the same,” you understand, as in, I don’t want to you to make me stagnate here in the exact same state I’m in now... I still want to grow and learn and improve and…"

This is going to be a long ride.