The Spirit's Work

Kenyon Adams

In my apartment building in Queens, I am fortunate to have asuperintendent with a kind and humble heart. James is a man of principle and deeply committed to his family, including his autistic son, Jason. We live in an old pre-war building with lots of issues so I am in regular communication with James for repairs. The problems in my apartment don't seem to be unique among the other 60 rentals in our building because this year James installed a little drop box in the lobby with instructions for how to make a service request and a little pen dangling from a string. It works like this: the tub gets clogged...again, and I drop a little note in the box explaining the problem, the level of urgency and a range of times that I can be available to receive the work. So, far it's been a pretty efficient little system, with perhaps one drawback. I'm never exactly sure when he's coming or how long it will take to do the repair. Most often, I find myself interrupted from REM sleep by the doorbell and jolted unexpectedly from my Tempur-Pedic pillow about an hour before I had intended to wake up on a weekday morning.

 I can't help but notice the similarities of this ongoing relationship to that of my prayer life. I receive so many answers to my prayers with the same scraggly disposition that James meets when he shows up at my door, toolbox in hand. What do we imagine the Spirit's work will look like when we pray, "Lord, change my heart. Make me more like you"? It is far more the will of the Father than my own that I be transformed into one who reflects his character. The disconnect comes in how I tend to think about and imagine the process of bringing about this transformation.

For the most part I think we have quite a different view of our hearts than God has. It's fitting. The plumber has quite a different view of your toilet than you do as well. For you, it's part of an unconscious habit of doing a business about which you take no particular notice until something has gone wrong. In God's reality your heart is a place of massive devastation, and yet also a place of glorious beauty and potential. This has everything to do with who he is, and the quality of his nature. In his nature lies the hope of our hearts. He's on the job. But are we awake to receive him?