Eric Youngblood: A Stupid Request

  • Tuesday, June 28, 2016

I once heard a neighbor, well-acquainted with prayer, introduce a happy answer from her past petitioning in a rather compelling way.

“Now y'all, this was a stupid request. But I was 20, you have to understand....”

She had apparently been engaged to the wrong man, headed into a vocation and life into which she could not follow, and was desperately asking God for some form of escape hatch.
 
The “stupid request” was obliged. 

During her soon to be terminated engagement to the wrong fella, she fortuitously met the young lad who’d soon become her adoring spouse for the next 40+ years. 

Stupid Requests Reveal Daring Trust
While I was heartened by the story, I was even more captivated by her lead-in.

What resonated within and was so instructive to me was her daring to place such “a stupid request” before the Sovereign Lord:
 
“I was 20.

You have to understand....” 

In other words, she reflected,  “I know I shouldn’t have asked what I did. But I was just a kid. A fool. Immature. Scared. Unsure.”
 
Notice what she didn’t say?

“Now y'all, I made this wise and sterling request, being, as I was, uncannily mature for a young woman of my age....”

nor

“Now y'all, since I had proven my character so sterling and my heart so unified in devotion to Christ, I felt bold to make a case for why God should answer what I was worthy to have him do for me, and what he actually owed me at this point.”

nor

“Now y'all, formerly I had sinned in some embarrassing ways, but I just looked God right in the eye and I swore to him, plain as day, that I’d never, ever, ever, ever do that again, and you better believe that I didn’t, so then I knew, just knew, God was going to answer my prayer.”

Ridiculous Requests from Cheese
Nope. None of that. Just a “stupid request.” 

One she apparently felt embarrassed to mention. But one she now feels giddy to report after 4 decades, perhaps because the statute of limitations has expired on reprisals from foolishness uttered at the end of adolescence.

Of course, her confession was our formative instruction, compelling us not to conclude she ought to be ashamed for her stupidity, but that she and our Master should be lauded.

It reminded me of another young woman’s audacious prayer. A 20 year old Flannery O’Connor in her Prayer Journal, which I don’t suppose she ever intended would be published, (consider yourself warned budding journallers who might one day be heralded writers!), offered this outlandish and lovely prayer to a God who mattered to her so dearly and whom she wanted to have matter even more:

“What I am asking for is really very ridiculous. Oh Lord, I am saying, at present I am a cheese, make me a mystic, immediately. But then God can do that—make a mystic out of cheeses. But why should He do it for an ingrate, slothful & dirty creature like me. I can’t stay in the church to say a Thanksgiving even and as for preparing for Communion the night before—thoughts all elsewhere. The Rosary is mere rote for me while I think of other and usually impious things. But I would like to be a mystic and immediately. But dear God please give me some place, no matter how small, but let me know it and keep it. If I am the one to wash the second step everyday, let me know it and let me wash it and let my heart overflow with love washing it. God loves us, God needs us. My soul too. So then take it dear God because it knows that You are all it should want and if it were wise You would be all it would want...You are all it does want, and it wants more and more to want You. Its demands are absurd. It’s a moth who would be king, a stupid slothful thing, a foolish thing, who wants God, who made the earth, to be its Lover. Immediately.”

Stupid requests are never knowingly made by the proud. There’s too much at stake. No one posing, mindful of their own branding, or image-managing finds themselves eager to ask for help, clarity, or renewal unless it be done with polished decorum. To ask stupidly might make them look, well, stupid.

Being Thoroughly UN-Impressed with Ourselves
Only those acquainted with embarrassing deficits in themselves grow skilled in making absurd requests of Christ, or of anyone. When you’ve been privileged to have grown so thoroughly unimpressed with yourself that you simply can’t keep up the charade of impressing others, making the “foolish” ask or the “audacious” request makes more sense than guzzling a Gatorade after a balmy summer 10k. Incomplete in ourselves, asking to receive from Another, becomes a desperate logical necessity. 

Charles Spurgeon clearly intuited this dynamic of relief when he perceptively asserted a comprehensive yet succinct proverb for “slothful ingrates” who are learning to trust a patient King:

“The rule of the kingdom is asking.” 

You can’t hike through many trails in the Scriptures without stubbing your toe on another invitation to develop into habitual “askers” or an example of some troubled someone who has taken the advice to make what can feel like awfully “stupid requests” to heart.

Asking Others Too
In a recent interview, NY Times Bestselling author, Malcolm Gladwell, was queried to disclose how he had developed such a keen capacity for asking questions of others. He promptly credited his dad. I paraphrase:

“My father..., though he has so many gifts, perhaps his finest of all is that he has zero intellectual insecurities, so he is never afraid to ask questions. He is always asking the obvious question, the “dumb” question, and does not care one whit whether anyone thinks he is idiotic or appears foolish. He’s not into that game...”

Gladwell’s father, a PhD in Mathematics, for instance, would gather frequently with his neighbors who were farmers in Canada...men who hadn’t finished high school but whom he admired and from whom he was constantly interested to learn what they knew. They possessed potent knowledge and useful wisdom. And he was wise enough to know what he didn’t know.

He remedied his deficits with a posture of humility that asked questions every place he went. And never wearied of saying, “I’m sorry, I don’t understand. Can you explain it to me?

A Divine Absurdity
Of course, to ask “stupid” questions or to make “audacious” requests of God or others, we must possess some solid sense of belonging. We have to, at least partially, believe that we have been known, clear through, “absurdities, slothfulness, and filth” and all, and yet accepted by Another any way. 

Christianity assures that it is a divine absurdity called the sacrifice of Christ that reassures those who trust Him that they have a permanent place to stand before God with nary a fear of being rebuffed. 

And by listening and leaning into Jesus’ insistence that we can’t be clean unless he washes us, we get the courage to insist, ask, and request in the most audacious and friendly ways, just like Dr. Glidewell in his encounter of others, or my neighbor and Flannery O’Connor in the college-aged versions of themselves as they approached God.

For the Sake of YOUR Name
Our audacity is bolstered because we know that any movement on his part in response to us is going to be generated by the kind of Lord he is, not because of the brand of beautiful wisdom and shiny righteousness we emit. So we can abandon all pretense and plead away for healing mercies.

That’s why the psalmist can say, “Show me the way I should go, for to YOU, O LORD, I lift up my soul.”

It is God’s nature to serve as divine Clorox to the heart-mildew of sin. It is our Savior’s inclination to act in ways that “absurd” pray-ers, and “stupid” ask-ers crave.

The Most Absurd Truth of All
We make audacious request and bold petitions, because we trust Him to respond. We do so knowing that as we ask, we become more convinced he is listening and that He is serving his world with a heart that weeps and is moved by the plight of his often “stupid” little ones and even his enemies. 

Those little ones are those who have permitted him to wash them clean in one absurd act of sacrifice that occurred at the hands of foolish men making “stupid” accusations: “He saved others,” they raved in unwitting satirical confidence, “but he can’t save himself.”

And that, during the first Holy week, was the most absurd truth of all. “He saved others, but he couldn’t save himself.” 

It was hauntingly true that “he couldn’t save himself,” because he was too intent on “saving others.”

Sacrifice is a fool’s errand in a world where God isn’t. But in the world that God steps into, it is the way for turning everything on its head, a sort of stupid, senseless, absurd, self-donation that yields brilliant, needful, exuberant hope for folks with the humility and sense to embrace it. 

Such folks fill their mouths and heaven’s ears with all sorts of “audacious”, “ridiculous”, and “stupid” requests, because they talk to the Sovereign King who can turn brutality to beauty, “moths to kings”, “cheese to mystics”, and the God-allergic to the God-cravers.

-----

Eric Youngblood is the senior pastor at Rock Creek Fellowship (PCA) on Lookout Mountain. Please feel free to contact him at eric@rockcreekfellowship.org.

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