Shockingly, I didn't get strep throat for a year.
Not as shockingly, I failed to keep up my end of the bargain.
After another few years of adventuring in Europe, I washed back onto US soil and tucked into the capitalist dream of making it on Wall Street. I devoured the New Thought writers, highlighting the scriptures referenced by Florence Scovel Shinn and Norman Vincent Peale and Emmet Fox. I prayed in Jesus' name because the books told me that would get me what I asked for, and they were right.
I prayed my way from rookie cold caller to top producing broker in the firm, from jaded single girl in the big city to the bride of the man of my dreams, and from shitty apartment to penthouse loft in a historic building, complete with someone to cook and clean for me. When employees and friends asked how I had achieved so much in such a short time, I forgot the name of the one who had covered me with blessings, the one whose presence we all felt at the altar on the day of my wedding, the one to whom my husband boyishly prayed before sleeping each night and whose love he patiently demonstrated to me each morning. Instead, I shrugged and gave all the praise to those American idols: I worked really hard, I earned it, I wanted it more than anybody else, etc.
I was fast racking up all the signifiers of a life well lived, basking in the world's approval and a glow of achievement I was completely unentitled to. Soon, my husband and I were blessed with even more: a pregnancy with boy-girl twins and a big, gorgeous second home outside the city, complete with white picket fence. We planned to sell our penthouse and live out in the affluent suburbs.
Then there was frightening news, too: our daughter would be born with a life-threatening birth defect, and there was no guarantee that the corrective surgery would save her life. My unborn daughter's name came to me in a flash from somewhere not of this world when I was waiting to be seen by one of a long string of specialists. Her name would be a prayer. Her name would be Liv, so that every time the nurses said it, the Lord would hear that this child was meant to live.
During my daughter's delivery, surgery, and eight-week convalescence in an isolette, I cried out to God, out loud and silently, to save her life. I could not touch her, but I lay my hands on her teeny, burning-hot body through the heavy plastic gloves that were the only way a pair of hands were allowed to penetrate the sterile plastic world of the box she lived in, and I prayed. I prayed in a whisper, shoulders shaking violently, till my tears and snot ran down the sides of that terrible coffin-like box where she lay in an induced morphine coma, suspended in glass-eyed agony between life and death; prayed until my husband took me from the room because I was scaring the other parents. My husband, too, prayed unceasingly. We hardly spoke of it.
Meanwhile, Auntie El and Uncle Tom mobilized squadrons of people in their own church and those of anyone else they knew to pray for us. My father-in-law, also a Christian, did the same where he lived in New Mexico. I bought myself a cross pendant and took it to the local jeweler's to buy a matching chain. "It'll take five to seven business days," he said.
"I need it now!" I said, desperate. "Please. This is very important to me. I need to wear it today."
He doubled the charge, I paid it gladly, and I drove back to the hospital with my armor on.
After two months of hell, our daughter finally came home. I thanked the people who had prayed for us. I hardly paused long enough to thank God before I started asking for more; this time for money to supplement our lifestyle while we waited for a buyer for the penthouse.
Heaps of money poured in when a company I owned stock in was bought out at a 100% return.
Again, I didn't pause long to offer thanks for the miraculous windfall.
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