I was struck by an anecdote in William Barry’s new book Praying the Truth. He was giving a talk on prayer once and afterward one of his listeners (a professor, no less) said, “You know, I would like to have a closer relationship with God, but I’m afraid if I get close, God will ask me to do something that’s too hard and I won’t be able to do it.”

Dear Timothy,
We can’t wait for your graduation from college this weekend. We’re thrilled. You’ll be so busy that day you won’t notice the graying dad muttering prayers of thanks into his program, saying amen, amen, amen.  

You’ll have to indulge me a little because sitting in my folding chair, I probably won’t be seeing you as you look now, the handsome, tall, clear-eyed history major. I’ll be seeing a picture of you in my head at about age five. (See below.)

Of all the seven sins, envy is the worst. I usually think of myself as the luckiest guy on Earth, richly blessed. That’s a good prayerful place to be.

Then I’ll read about some twentysomething billionaire or, worse yet, the fiftysomething first-time author with sterling reviews and bestselling numbers. Green with envy, I shout, “Why not me?”

Here’s the rule for this blog: If you think something, say it to God. So the shout turns into a prayer: God, why don’t you make me rich and famous like that guy?

I was rushing out of the office to get a late lunch when the elevator stopped at the law firm on the sixteenth floor and ten men dressed in dark suits squeezed on. “I guess you all had to leave at the same time,” I said.

“We’ve got to get back to our offices,” said the fellow with the yarmulke standing next to me.

“You don’t work here?” I asked.

This Thursday is National Day of Prayer, and prodded by Ross Douthat’s new book Bad Religion, I figured I’d look up John Winthrop’s famous sermon “City Upon a Hill,” so often mentioned in politicians’ visions of America.

My wife, Carol, has been away working as a writer-in-residence in Atlanta and she comes home tomorrow. Yippee! At last! Let me tell you that bachelor living has lost its allure.

Charles W. “Chuck” Colson, who died this weekend, wrote an outrageously good book more than 35 years ago called Born Again. All the ink obituary writers have been spilling about his involvement in Watergate and then his heroic work reaching out to the incarcerated with Prison Fellowship make him sound at best like a second Paul, a man who switched sides.

The legendary (and NCAA championship-winning) basketball coach John Wooden used to say, “Make each day your masterpiece.”

How do I do that? I was thinking as I dropped by the shoe-repair shop at lunch to get my shoes shined. I’d have to pray about this one.

Unwittingly, I had stepped into the middle of an argument. A young woman, near tears, was saying to the owner, “I can’t give you cash. I only have a twenty-dollar bill. I have to give you a check.”

My cat Fred always gives me a hard time when I come back from a vacation. He’s a rescue cat, who was found wandering around the subway platform in Harlem nine years ago, very near Frederick Douglass Boulevard. Hence his name.

“Were you afraid you were abandoned again?” I ask him. “Did you not like your cat sitter?”

He runs around the house, yowling, and then sulks in a corner. I check his food dish. Full. I look at his water dish. Plenty of water. And the cat sitter has left the radio on for company.

Who’s in your Amen corner?

I was talking to a couple of my colleagues here at Guideposts who do a lot of preaching, and I think it was Lemuel Beckett who said, “When you need encouragement it’s good to look to your Amen corner.”

I’d never heard the phrase but I latched onto the idea immediately. What a great thing to have in life! Those people you can look to who will say Amen when you’re out on a limb.