Welcome to what is shaping up to be a regular feature here: “What Kirby Got Wrong This Time.”
Once again Facebook friends are sharing and liking a recent Salt Lake Tribune column by Robert Kirby. This time it’s about answers to prayer.
He dodders on for a few paragraphs of what must be intended for humor, about getting or not getting answers to prayer. Whatever. Then comes this:
“Prayer is a deeply personal thing. The times when I feel like I’ve gotten an answer are rare and I tend to keep that stuff to myself. I wish other people would.”
Yes, prayer is a deeply personal thing, and direct, recognizable, immediate answers may be rare enough. If you don’t want to share your experiences, fine. Picking the right audience for sacred narratives helps keep them sacred and not profane.
But then he goes on to ridicule a woman speaking in what sounds like a testimony meeting, because she prayed about something Kirby found trivial – the woman wanted to locate a recipe. She found her misplaced recipe.
“I’m not saying this didn’t happen,” he says. “I am saying that it’s something she should have kept to herself because – and I know this is going to sound harsh – her problem is teeth-grindingly trivial to people with real ones.”
This is where we part company.
Compared to being infected with the Ebola virus, compared to having your house blown up by a Middle Eastern bomb, compared to whether or not you can feed your children tonight, this is trivial. No question. The problems that most of us face most of the time are trivial compared to those.
Yet they are still real, and to us, at the time, they are serious – the lost recipe was, at that moment, the embodiment of the mocked woman’s love for her grandmother and her awareness of the impending separation of death. It is not trivial to her, no matter how trivial it is to Kirby.
“Seriously,” he goes on, “it’s a bit insensitive to publicly exclaim how God led you to a missing recipe when there are probably people in the audience who’ve lost family members to disease, people who suffered prolonged sexual abuse, or people with … I don’t know. People with more pressing problems.”
I’m pretty sure the insensitivity doesn’t lie with the people who testify that God answers prayers, even concerning trivial matters; I’m pretty sure the insensitivity lies with Kirby, in dismissing anyone’s griefs, no matter how small. He thinks the woman’s experience is unworthy of notice. It wouldn’t be the first time, I suspect, that Kirby and God saw matters differently.
Even when one person’s problems are less life-shattering than another’s, they are real. We all turn to God, or at least have the opportunity of turning to him, for comfort and support. That comfort isn’t offered only to the one whose pains are, for the moment, the most acute.
As a parent, do you ignore your small son’s grief over being left out of a birthday party because your daughter’s problems with her boyfriend are “bigger” or because your elderly parent just wrecked the car? Don’t you give each loved one the care he or she needs, regardless of whether one person’s troubles are “less important” than another’s? Do you feel justified in telling the ones with trivial problems not to come to you for comfort, or never to speak of the matter afterwards, for fear of being insensitive to the one with the more serious troubles?
And if someone feels that God has answered her prayer, why in all that’s holy would you deny that person the privilege of testifying to it in an LDS testimony meeting? God feeds the sparrow, the scripture tells us. That’s trivial enough – will Kirby conclude, then, the way he concludes his column, “How’d [the sparrow] get so lucky when, despite a billion wrenching prayers, [children die of starvation in whatever is the world’s current famine site]?”
You’re losing touch, Kirby, and for a humor columnist it’s isn’t funny. I don’t understand the Facebook love for this column.
This really disappoints me. I understand that a lot of people are upset/hurt/concerned about various issues in the Church right now. But I feel that this is manifesting itself more and more frequently by becoming snarky and dismissive of other people, especially those who are perhaps more traditional. This is one of many examples I’ve heard lately. They are tiny but I hear them more and more, I feel. They betray contempt for those who take literally and personally the traditional doctrines, and especially the culture, of the Church.
The funny thing is that Kirby himself has transitioned into a soft grandpa full of treacly advice about the right way to live and worship. When he was still a cop writing for Utah County papers, the humor was dark and cynical without much ambition of uplift, and pretty good. Lines like, “Let’s just say you won’t find many cops at anti-abortion rallies.”
Not responding to Kirby in particular, but thinking about trivial answers to trivial prayers: for whatever reason, my trivial prayers get answered more often than the big earth-shattering prayers do. Lots more often. And it turns out they also mean more to me. There’s a limit on how happy and wowed you can be, and answers to the big prayers reach that limit pretty quickly. Whereas finding out that God cares about you enough that he cares about the little stuff in your life just warms you up. In a way, what Kirby is saying is the point: we all have things we care about that are too stupid and trivial to share in public–we’ll just get ridiculed for it–it takes a special kind of friend to care enough not to smirk–God is that special kind of friend.
Kirby’s concerned about the wrong thing. Here’s what he should have written:
We need to be aware that our prayers may have been answered and miracles bestowed, while someone listening may have offered the same prayer without receiving the desired answer. So, we offer praise and thanksgiving to God for His goodness, but we cannot suggest either that we earned that goodness through our own faithfulness, or that if everybody would just exercise that same amount of faith then surely everybody would be granted the miracle.
I’ve thought about exactly this as my daughter comes to me with an invisible “owie” (how DOES one spell that?) or cries about how the mean little twit at school is treating her that day.
Part of me wants to go “this isn’t an owie,” or “seriously, who cares what she thinks?” Especially when I’m stressing about paying off the new roof and furnace, or wondering how I’m going to schedule the million things I have to do—let alone the ones I WANT to do. But the problems are real to my girls.
And compared to losing a family member or something, my problems aren’t exactly big, either. But they are hard on me.
And that is the delicately beautiful secret of the Atonement: it isn’t just about the big stuff, it’s about everything. Christ chose to suffer so He could understand our suffering, not so He could Lord it over us and declare: “well, yeah, but it’s not as bad as me hanging on the cross, right?!”
If you don’t learn that, you’re missing the whole point of Church, I think.
Apocryphal unattributed story alert!
I’m reminded of George Durrant telling the story about his son, Devin, playing in a national one-on-one basketball tournament in high school. George was watching with a friend, and grew quiet for a minute. The friend asked what he was doing, and George answered, “I was praying for Devin to do well.” The friend responded, “George, I’m pretty sure the Lord doesn’t care about basketball games.” To which George replied, “No but he does care about sons.”
I’ve often thought about that and what seems trivial things for some usually aren’t all that trivial to others at the time.
I wonder if this was a reaction to something that was hurting him. I remember fighting the bitter feelings when someone talked in church about God helping her to learn patience when her husband doesn’t pick up his socks. I sure wished that was MY problem! How dare she complain! I didn’t have a blog to vent my feelings though.
Blogs are a great outlet for that kind of frustration, Carol. Probably newspaper columns are, too.
If I had had a blog back then, I would be in so much trouble now!
I see what you’re saying. I agree with Carol that this probably comes from a place of hurt and I’m so glad I don’t have a blog. I’ve certainly felt that way. I really struggle with personal revelation, and sometimes people’s stories of finding lost car keys can really trigger a bout of self doubt and pain as I try to figure out why God so clearly helps other people but why I haven’t been able to perceive an answer even to my desperate prayers for faith. I’ve also tried to comfort friends who wondered similar things after making it through a personally hard testimony meeting. I like Mark B.’s take. It takes great grace to balance acknowledging the miracles in your life with compassion on those around you. I think most of us fail at it.
I think answered, lost then found key, prayers are testimony builders. I think every praying child has such an experience as a tender mercy. These small answered prayers tell me He is there and then the big “revelations” about The Mountain Meadow Massacre! Gasp! Bother me not in the least. I have my own relationship and testimony.
Years ago I had a friend who was an LDS convert of about 10 years. He was in the bishopric, had a fulltime job, 6 children at the time, and only one functioning bathroom due to a plumbing blockage. He told me of all the things he had attempted to find the problem in the limited time he had to work on it. I asked him, “Have you prayed about this?” He looked really shocked and said, “Why would I pray about my plumbing?” I responded by asking, “What about your plumbing is so complicated that God couldn’t understand it?’ He then asked, “Why would God care about my plumbing?” I pointed out that the only way he could accomplish everything else he had going was to resolve the problem quickly, so I thought God would be willing to help out. The next time I was him was in passing at church, where he hissed, “Turns out God does plumbing.”
I like this story because it points out that nothing in our lives is too trivial to interest God. I think it also illustrates my observation that God often answers our small prayers quickly to give us the faith and courage to fight our way through the big issues we are praying about that take much longer to be resolved.
There have been times I’ve prayed for something that seemed important at the time, and the prayer was cheerfully granted — then later I got thinking how trivial it really was.
Perhaps these occasions balance the occasions when a situation became increasingly frustrating, until I finally lost my temper and (I am ashamed to say) snapped out a few blue phrases, only to see the situation resolve itself moments later, quietly and with little fuss. “You &@@!! computer! Why the &*@@ aren’t you calculating that correctly? I ought to take you by your $$!! electronic neck and … huh. … That subscript on line 1271 isn’t right, is it?”
Both are, I suppose, teaching opportunities for God. I much prefer the first kind.
“I don’t understand the Facebook love for this column.”
I fear it’s because he’s tapping into a vein of cynicism, or worse, in a lot of his readers. I hope I’m wrong, because that would be sad.
We went through some difficult trials this past year—ongoing unemployment and then a job and a move across the country. I can attest that it was the many “little” prayers that were answered during that time that helped me remember that the Lord was keenly aware of us. Those little miracles–and there were many–gave us hope and strengthened our faith until it was time for the big miracles to occur. I don’t think I will ever get tired of hearing another “I prayed and found my keys” story. They have happened to me on many many occasions. It is always comforting to be reminded that God is in the details of our lives. I think these are what Elder Bednar referred to as Tender Mercies.
Thanks, Ardis. I believe it is easier for God to answer the small requests, because they do not affect the long term overall witness of many people. God can help me find my keys without it becoming a faith crisis/decision for an entire nation, whereas if God were to stop a war or stop the Ebola outbreak through a clear miracle, then the issues of agency, faith and enduring for many people are impacted.
It also allows us to look for the small miracles, instead of seeking a First Vision event on a daily basis. As a parent, it is easier for me to grant small requests to my children than the big ones. I can buy them an ice cream cone, without worrying about it impacting their health or happiness in any long term way. However, to pay for their college can impact them in major positive and negative ways, requiring more thought, consideration and preparation.
Kirby is humorous, but his is a shallow humor attempting to be deep. And in doing so, he often gets it wrong.
I’ve seen this meme a lot in the blogosphere in the past year or two, usually along the lines of “you shouldn’t give thanks for something because you might offend someone who didn’t get that blessing,” or “that miracle couldn’t possibly have happened to you, because other people need bigger miracles and didn’t get them.”
Seems like of like the Mormon version of “you didn’t build that” or “you don’t deserve to be that successful because there are people out there that are less successful.”
Whatever happened to rejoicing in blessings in other’s lives, and letting their blessed experiences strengthen our faith that the Lord will bless us as well?