Ramble with Storm: Sunday School lesson & praying on deer

Mulling things on my morning ramble

with Storm, the family’s mixed Lab.

Lois Johnson was back teaching Sunday School again yesterday, for the first time in months.

A fall had knocked her back. She even had a stint in a nursing home–just another fire of adversity forging the Godliness of the 80-something woman.

Her lesson was on prayer. When she mentioned that we should pray about things that are important to us, I blurted, “So it is OK for me to pray for those deer to get closer?”

I did not ask her or this frivolously. It is truly a question relevant in my life.

And she was the right person to ask. Her husband George was one of the great early bowhunters in Illinois. He used to have people lined up deep to take his extra deer. Up until he started drifting a few years ago, he was still setting up a ground blind and spending days deer hunting.

Now, I feel vaguely guilty muttering a prayer to bring deer closer. It seems to me that God might have bigger and more pressing things than pushing a few deer closer to me. Say the building tensions in the Middle East.

Such are the tings that rumble around my head and get a good workout on my morning rambles.

After Lois suggested it was absolutely proper for somebody like me to pray about deer, she asked, “Have you ever shot a deer?”

Which only made my wife bust out a wide smirk.

And I answered truthfully, we were in church after all, “A handful.”

Thy will be done.