Finding Momentum

There are four of us in this room, keep­ing the six-o’clock watch mark­ing the sun’s descent in this myrtle-green night­club under­go­ing trans­for­ma­tion to a sacred space, saw­dust fill­ing our nos­trils and uncov­er­ing shafts of light leak­ing from sky­lights (and I sneeze).

One cor­ner of the room is a cafe in a half-constructed state with orange walls, orange booths and orange tables whose sim­i­lar­ity to a ‘50s diner is uncanny, down to the sticky vinyl seats and fad­ing chrome accents around the seat bases.

A Latino man and his wife, renowned prayer inter­ces­sors (or so I am
told when they enter the room an hour ear­lier) are silently kneel­ing
in the cen­ter of the room, their lips mov­ing and eye­brows fur­rowed in
intense con­cen­tra­tion (I try to search for words to describe their expres­sions, and come up with noth­ing bet­ter than “pleading”).

The other end of the room is a wall of clear glass cubes afford­ing a view at an empty con­crete court­yard which pre­vi­ously saw life as a swim­ming pool, no doubt among the young, glitzy and the glam­ourous (tonight, it is barren).

My friend Andy, tall, bronzed and lanky in torn jeans and a “Trust Me I’m a Doc­tor” tee shirt is walk­ing about in a mean­der­ing cir­cle, hands stuffed in his pock­ets and whis­per­ing con­fi­dent words I can­not deci­pher as I only hear the escap­ing hisses of the “s” consonant.

sss (silence) ss tss (silence)

Three walls and the ceil­ing of the club are painted black (iron­i­cally), and I, sprawled out and lying on my back, imag­ine I am star­ing into a night­time sky and not know­ing what to pray, faced with the immense lone­li­ness of stars and sky, won­der­ing who am I (who I am) and what exactly I am pray­ing for (for in two weeks I leave for col­lege, releas­ing behind me a mess of unre­al­ized hopes and hearsay)–little less sure if any­thing lies between the stars I see in dark ceilings.

(I remem­ber watch­ing a video in fifth grade–an array of num­bers spins
up to 4.39 years–for the time light from our clos­est star, Alpha
Cen­tauri, takes to reach the outer edges of our Solar Sys­tem. The
thought of wait­ing four years for light had bog­gled my mind. What
hap­pened in the mean­time? Did dark­ness just wait? And who was counting?)

I still can’t remem­ber to this day how Andy and I met, but for meet­ing up with him after we had cor­re­sponded a cou­ple of times via email and talk­ing about his crazy idea of start­ing a stu­dent prayer vigil, 24s of hours con­tin­u­ally (24 soon bloomed to 48 bloomed to 72) and every time we were unsure about going through with another one I just remem­ber his con­fi­dent yeah man, let’s do it (there was no doubt).

Andy was one of the cool kids, but I sus­pect this was less because he was hand­some or rode a Kawasaki motor­bike (com­par­isons were drawn to Korean pop stars and helped his case with the ladies), but because he had this cool con­fi­dence about him that had his friends won­der where he got it, and they quickly wished he didn’t have it when he got up on lunch tables dur­ing senior year at 12PM and started talk­ing about Jesus-following (the fac­ulty had asked him to stop but he couldn’t).

The man motions to Andy and me to join them in the mid­dle of the room; we gather and he begins to speak of the bur­den for the city and for the church, big things and beau­ti­ful things and hum­bling things and sor­row­ful things, and I see in this man the bro­ken­ness of a man whose heart is chained to the peo­ple his God loves (I change my mind, the cor­rect word for his expres­sion is “mournful”).

Then he begins to share God-inspired things to Andy, speak­ing out the Father’s love for his son, speak­ing beau­ti­ful words into his future, beau­ti­ful words really, of lead­er­ship, of pre­pared­ness, of assur­ance, of con­fi­dence and of com­mis­sion­ing to Andy, who breathes deeply and keeps his eyes closed.

Then it’s my turn, and I look up and wait for the stars on the ceil­ing to come down, for my pin­pricks of faith amidst dashed hopes to sud­denly fall ablaze from the sky and for this I will let him speak.

And the man, in a steady mea­sured voice full of com­pas­sion, sim­ply tells me God wants you to wait–and lis­ten. So much. Keep wait­ing for him.

I brush aside those words and hastily sup­press dis­ap­point­ment that they were not large-words, not even close! but words that demanded that I not have any (oh God, I know it is true.) Andy’s hand is on my shoul­der and we utter sound­less words.

7/28/2004