Last night God walked me into a room and sat me at his table. He then said, “Travis, ask your questions. State your requests and see if I do not answer them.”
I gingerly removed a tattered piece of paper from my coat pocket and unrolled it on the table. Upon it, in different colored ink, were many little jotted notes and scribbles, each written during a different journey in life. Some were bold and written in large hard to miss print. Others were just footnotes or offshoots of thoughts. Even others were underlined, marked with stars, or circled. Each thought came with a story and a need. Each important and each desired.
I looked up at him and thought, Surely I am asking too much, such a thing isn’t even possible. “How can I ask this? I don’t deserve it.”
He smiled and reached across the table and touch the fragile page. There, a light flickered from his hand and the page, torn from years of folding and refolding, began to be restored. From each tear, strands of gold reached out to grasp the other edge and together the stitched the spit edges. The words, which had been in scribble pen, darkened deeply and became like perfectly printed words, formed by a master artisan. The little words, the ones I deemed too insignificant, became large and bold and filled the page, just as the ones I had declared critical. Each was just as important as the next. “Do you not ask because you think I will not answer?”
I stared at him in admiration, dumbfounded by his words, because his statement was not a criticism or a challenge, but a promise.
I took hold of the sheet, but no longer was it made of paper. Between my fingers I felt the warmth of cooling metal as the sheet of gold hardened.
I began to read.
One by one I spoke them and with each God laughed joyously, “Because you have asked these things of me, I will not withhold them from you! My son, see that no request is too great for me and that no request too insignificant?”
One by one he answered them. As I neared the end of the page, I realized that I was no longer reading what I had written. There were dozens more that were new requests that I simply never thought to write down. I looked again baffled at my father.
His smile overwhelmed me, “I cannot only answer the requests you bring, but I know your heart and your desires better than you. I have taken the liberty of adding a few things I knew you needed.”
I can honestly say, sitting at that dinner table across from my father, was the first time in years that I have felt so much at home and cared for.
“For my eyes run to and fro throughout the earth, seeking out those whose hearts are blameless toward me, that I may fight on their behalf.”