They called him "Little G" and, except for the fact that he liked to have his grapes peeled for him before he ate them, he was a normal little boy. Loved his parents. Idolized his big brother. Doted on his baby sister. Had a Hopalong Cassidy gun belt and holster and didn’t like to miss "The Lone Ranger" on T.V.

One August afternoon in 1954, as he his family were celebrating his seventh birthday, Little G’s right arm quit working. He found himself unable to bring his fork from his plate to his mouth. So he switched hands, went on with his meal and didn’t mention it.

By the next day, however, it was clear to the boy’s parents that something was wrong, so they set up an emergency trip to their family doctor, fearing the worst. That summer had been a particularly bad one for polio. Countless children had been stricken with the disease, which ate away at their muscles leaving many of them paralyzed. Those children were considered lucky compared to the unfortunate thousands whose lungs were affected and who couldn’t breathe on their own. The balance of their lives--thirty, forty, fifty years sometimes--were spent enclosed in giant breathing machines called "iron lungs. Alive, but never able to leave. Many more died.

And so, as she awaited the doctor’s diagnosis, Little G’s God-fearing mother prayed. Prayed hard. Prayed that her son didn’t have polio.

In the eleventh chapter of Luke’s gospel, Jesus’ disciples ask him to teach them to pray. Apparently John the Baptist had given his disciples some instructions regarding prayer and now at least one of Jesus’ followers wants him to do the same. So Jesus gives them a kind of model prayer, the heart of which seems to be a submission to God’s will and a desire to see his Kingdom on Earth. Submission to God’s will can be a hard thing, especially when you look around and admit that there seems to be a lot of ugliness that falls into that category, if God’s will includes everything that he allows to happen.

There was a woman killed on Glenway avenue near Glenway Crossing Monday night. She was crossing the road to meet her husband, who was waiting for her on the other side. Before she made it across she was run down by a black Toyota which, it seems, was racing another car. The husband watched as his wife broke eye contact with him to turn and tried futilely to protect herself from a vehicle which was going over sixty miles an hour. He watched as she tried, in that, fraction of a second to get her body to move out of the way. Watched as the car struck her. Watched as she flew twelve feet through the air and landed hard on the street. Watched as the car fled speeding from the scene and watched as his wife’s life ended face down on the pavement.

And while I doubt that God caused that, the God we talk about could have stopped it, and didn’t. And I don’t know why and neither do you. "Thy will be done," can be a terrifying prayer, and hard to pray sincerely. But that’s the attitude that Jesus seems to be after. Left to its own, my will isn’t always to forgive. Jesus makes it clear that God’s is. Left to its own, my will is prone to seek the temptations I enjoy the most, Jesus makes it clear that God would like to show me a better way.

"When you pray," he says, "say this: ‘…thy will be done.’" But the next thing out of his mouth is a story about a man who needs some bread to feed some company and whose friend only helps him to shut him up after he’s spent half the night badgering him, pleading with him, trying to change his will. "I tell you," Jesus says, " though he will not get up and give him the bread because he is his friend, yet because of his persistence he will get up and give him as much as he needs."

"Ask and it shall be given, seek and you shall find, knock and the door shall be open to you," but apparently only if you’re willing to bang on it all night long. And what in the world does that kind of persistence have to do with submitting to God’s will? If he’s swayed by my persistent

praying--if I can change his mind by praying hard enough--then what was his will for me in the first place? And shouldn’t the will of God (whom I say I believe loves me) be better for me before I put in my two cents than when it’s been colored by my opinion? What exactly is the relationship here?

There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of books available that claim to understand and explain the mechanics of prayer--what we called "efficacy" in Bible college. How to pray, what kind of prayers to pray, when to pray, why to pray, and how and why God responds (or doesn’t) to all of that.

None of that has ever been very satisfying to me. Some of them seem arrogant, some oversimplified (or is that the same thing?). Many of them, though, present a view that’s just too mechanical for me. The Universe isn’t a machine with gears and switches and levers and knobs. It’s Alive. And whatever sense I can make of living in it has to begin with the understanding that God is so much bigger than I am that nothing but arrogance would allow me to believe that I understand him.

The doctor broke the news as concisely as he could–it was polio–and before Little G realized what was happening he was rushed to the nearest big-city hospital, nearly two hours away. No time to pack--to grab a yo-yo or tin sheriff’s badge. No time to say good-bye to anyone. Just a rushed ride to St. Louis where he was left in one of those scary 1950’s hospitals. Alone. His father had to work--hospitals have never been cheap--and his mother had two other children at home. And so at seven years old he faced the darkness and the echoes and the smells and the voices and the equipment and the unknown by himself.

Three days later he welcomed a roommate to the bed next to him. His older brother--who had himself contracted polio--delivered by their mother, whose two sons both lay in a hospital room stricken with the most horrific disease of their time. How much damage would it do? Would they be paralyzed? Sentenced to the Iron Lung? Would they live at all? What goes through a mother’s mind? Had she not prayed enough? Hard enough? Often enough? Was this what God wanted? This kind of suffering?

How do you pray in a world like that?

How do you pray in a world where begging that it wasn’t your son shot in the head on that video means praying that it was some other mother’s son?

How do you pray when the doctor says, "It’s lymphoma," and your faith is submitted to God’s will but your spirit prays without ceasing for Life to overcome death one more time?

In the movie Shadowlands, C.S. Lewis is quoted as saying, "Prayer doesn’t change God, it changes me." Maybe there’s something to that. (The Buddhists seem to have that figured out.) In 2 Corinthians, Paul writes that in order to keep him from becoming conceited, he was given what he calls, "a thorn in the flesh--a messenger of Satan." We don’t know what it was--I’ve got an opinion, but that’s not important right now--but Paul repeatedly pleaded with God to take it away. He was persistent. And God told him to drop it. That God’s grace was enough for him. And what Paul learned and became through the whole experience seems to have been of greater significance than the more immediate issues of suffering and unfulfilled prayer requests.

I’m not suggesting for a second that God never honors the requests we bring to him. I’m certain we could easily spend an hour yet this morning passing the microphone around the room sharing stories of answered prayer. I believe we could start with the Scherers.

But what seems to be most important to Jesus is our pursuit of the Kingdom, where God’s will is done. He spends verses 11-13 illustrating for his followers how ridiculous it would be to expect God to respond to prayer with something bad (there‘s no room in the Kingdom for "be careful what you pray for.") and he wraps it up by pointing out that the good gift that God is so eager to give is the Holy Spirit. Perhaps it’s the Spirit of God that the preceding verses assume we’re pounding on the door asking for.

He says to pray persistently, and then a chapter later he says not to worry about anything, but to seek the Kingdom first. That everything else will be taken care of. Maybe prayer in the Kingdom is something other than what we’ve made it.

Little G survived his polio, as did his older brother. After months in the hospital and weeks with his right arm in a harness up over his head, and many more months of painful therapy in the back room of his parents’ house, he went back to school and led a normal life. Went on to play church-league basketball, served on the drill team in high school, played in the band. When he was in college he married a pretty young lady and then within a year of their wedding, was drafted to fight in Vietnam. And again his mother prayed.

Vietnam. Where so many young men were killed in combat or ruined emotionally and psychologically. And from where, when they returned, soldiers were routinely welcomed home with fear and derision and contempt.

But this young man (whom no one called "Little G" anymore) was determined, because of a bout with polio when he was a child, to be "4F"– physically ineligible to serve in combat– and missed the whole traumatic Vietnam experience.

In case you haven’t figured it out, Little G was my dad. They called him "Little Gary" to differentiate between him and an older neighbor boy also named Gary. And I don’t know that my dad has ever been grateful for polio--I doubt it--and I don’t believe that God gave it to him intentionally--though you never know; certainly he allowed it--but if my dad hadn’t had it, he would very likely have seen combat in the jungles of Vietnam. Had he been killed over there, neither my sister nor I would have been born and at least the time you’re spending listening to me talk right now would have been different. And God knows what else.

Had he survived, it’s likely that he would have come home a very different person. And even if my sister and I had then been born, we’d have grown up different people in a different home and likely gone on to different lives.

Beyond that, my dad is a teacher. Has been for over thirty years. How many people has he touched who’ve gone on to matter to the people in their lives? Look up at the heavens and count the stars.

All made possible because God knew better than my Grandmother in 1954 when she prayed so hard.

Paul Simon said, "God only knows, God makes his plans, the information is unavailable to the mortal man." And I’m not at all sure he was wrong. We’re just not working with all the information here. And sometimes you have to wait to see a fuller picture.

In Luke 11, Jesus, having just instructed his followers to seek the Kingdom and God’s will, tells a story about persistence, and then seems to come immediately back to how much sense it makes to trust God to give us what we need.

But his best teaching on prayer comes later in a garden and doesn’t look like teaching at all, but like the overflow of a heart submitted to God. Jesus in a garden, the night before he would be tortured and killed, echoing his own words: "Your will be done." Having asked repeatedly for God to find another way, and having been denied, he submits to a God whose will is perfect, if sometimes painful.