As I was walking home from work this afternoon I had one of those moments. You know, a moment where you are transported to a different time. A different place.

 

I was walking and I was praying. Just conversing with God about stuff that the days and weeks have brought. It was a casual conversation and God is patient ’cause I tend to do all the talking. The sun is a brilliant bright white-yellow and the wind is strong but not cold. The streets were dry and dusty and suddenly it was 1974 and I was walking home from school.

 

You know I walked home pretty much every day and it felt like a long walk but then maybe it was the rambling, half-searching kind of walking I would do that made it feel that way. Every so often I would stop along the way and dam up some run-off stream to see how big a lake I could make. Sometimes I would pause along the train tracks and tug at the odd spike to see if I could get lucky. The whole time I would be praying.

 

I didn’t know I was praying. No one ever spent a lot of time with me saying that you could pray to God. You should pray to God. He wants you to pray to Him. It was just something I did to pass the time.

 

We’d converse mostly about stuff going on around me. The weather was good and I’d thank Him for that. I’d pray for things that a six-year-old prays for telling Him it would be nice to find some detonating caps along the tracks I could blow up or maybe a new bike to make the trip go by faster between school and home. Some days it would just be a rambling kind of talk letting Him know how the day went and what I had been up to. As if He didn’t know.

 

There was never any question about whether He heard me or listened. I took it for granted that He did and that was good enough. Then – when I got home the praying stopped and I went inside. I didn’t pray much inside except at bed. Maybe it was easy to pray outside in the summer sun because the inside was dark and the walls were close and the ceiling seemed ominous in our small home. Like God needed me outside in "His" world to really hear me.

 

I don’t know. All I know is my conversation with God dried up as I got older the way a summer friendship dries up in the cold of autumn. Friends move on, they turn to memories and memories to myth and eventually there’s just a space and dust where the one you loved used to be.

 

So today I’m walking home in the sun and the wind and I’m six-years-old again and I’m talkin’ to God and I know He’s listening. My prayers have not changed much since then…I still ramble on and on, sometimes about nothing at all just wanting to keep the line open as long as I can like a love-struck kid who calls his long distance girlfriend at 1 am and lets her fall asleep on the phone because that’s ok – he knows they’re connected over the line and that’s all that matters. She’s still there breathing softly at the other end.

 

So there I am walking.

 

There I am talking.

 

And I still ask for stuff I shouldn’t and I still pray for people I’d rather not pray for but know He wants me to so I do (and I know He can hear the grudging tone in my voice like Jonah in the desert).

 

I’m just talking to God and walking along and asking for foolishness and wisdom and praying that He will separate the two and give me what’s good.

 

And there’s the sun shining and wind blowing and the streets are dusty in a good way and there’s nobody there but me and God and I wish it would never end.