Sparrow Prayers and Thunderstorms

Chieko Okazaki was in Church leadership when I was born and will be a patron saint in my family forever. In her 2002 book Being Enough, she preached about sparrow prayers. Sparrow prayers are one of Okazaki’s answer to the same question I pondered a few months ago: why does God, who promises that if we ask He will give, not always give what we ask for, even when we’re asking for good things?

Sparrow prayers are smaller prayers that God can answer when He and She can’t answer the big asks at that moment. Because our Heavenly Parents delight in blessing us, when they can’t do the big stuff (for a variety of reasons that Okazki explores here), They shower us with the small. Rain is one of my sparrow prayers.

Growing up in Hawaii, rain was the rhythm I fell asleep to most nights. Hawaii rain is dense. It falls thickly and steadily and warmly, and after I moved to the desert for school, I missed its consistency. When it did rain, especially as I was falling asleep, especially when I was having a hard time, it always felt like love. Every time it rained it felt like God had seen me and said, “Time to send Marissa a little love. Let’s get a rainstorm in there.” God may not have been in Elijah’s wind or earthquakes or fire (1 Kings 19), but He was in my rain. So whenever things got really bad, whenever I really needed to know that God was there and had my back, I prayed for rain.

The July before I moved to Boston, things were especially rough. I was getting ready to leave people and a place that I’d spent six years building my life around, and I was in mourning. I was also doing a lot of caretaking for a lot of people who were in very difficult positions. I sat up nights with people as they sobbed, escorted them to doctor’s appointments, sat in the ER, drove them to get the only food that it sounded like they’d be able to get down that day. I was constantly sleep deprived and close to tears, and I wanted the few seconds of relaxation that I knew rain could give me. I wanted it, too, as a sign that there was heavenly backup nearby, that I wasn’t as alone as I felt.

At the end of a particularly tough week—a week in which I’d hung out at the ER watching my roommate get pumped full of morphine (using an increasingly impressive vocabulary as she got increasingly high)—I was climbing into bed when the rain came. Rain in Utah is often a pattering affair, but this rain was thundering. It was like Hawaii rain. It sounded like the sky was falling down.

I jumped out of bed and ran outside only to find that my entire street had done the same thing. Across the street, a friend who’d split a string cheese with me in the ER while we waited for our friend to be diagnosed, held his hands up to the sky and yelled, “RISA! You did it!”

We stood in the downpour, ten thirty at night, watching lightning split the sky, and I breathed easy for the first time in weeks.

Same summer, some of the same excellent people, different day

You could, of course, call that a coincidence. You could say, “It’s not all about you, Marissa. It’s a bit presumptuous to suggest God sent a rainstorm that literally lit up the sky (and the mountain—it caught fire and was almost immediately put out by the downpour) just because you were having a rough week.” These things are of course true. My only response is that I’m confident that God wasn’t unaware of the rain, nor was He unaware of my bad week. He knew that the storm would give me some relief. I don’t need Him to have orchestrated the whole thing for me to see that awareness as a gift.

In “On Being a Cripple,” Nancy Mairs’s says something that I’ve remembered ever since I read it in AP Lit: “I accept all gifts.” She’s talking about seeing the bright side, silver linings, all of that—but the phrasing has stuck with me, I think, because gifts are given as well as received. Calling something a gift is acknowledging a benevolent force in the universe, it’s recognizing purpose behind something that has brought you joy.

I want to be someone who accepts all gifts. I want to see when God (or anyone else) reaches out in love to me. I think that’s what gratitude is—seeing and accepting love from whatever direction it’s coming from. It doesn’t have to be big, it doesn’t have to be important, or even specifically for me—if God sent the rain that night, He probably did it for lots of reasons. But He knew it would make me happy, and I think that must have been part of it.

I think when we’re grateful, we give God more ways to give us love. He can send us rain knowing that we’ll see Him in it. He can send us dreams or visions, angels or prophesies—but He can also send us a random person who has an extra brownie or a quote on Instragram we needed, an unexpectedly sunny day or wildlife sighting. He can do it on purpose, knowing that we’ll receive it as such, knowing that we will see it, because we accept all gifts.