Last Thursday just before noon I was having lunch at 4 on 5 with some friends who were moving the very next day to Texas.  Fritz has been more than a good friend…we call each other “bro.”  We do this because sometimes we talk and treat each other a bit differently than friends…more like brothers.  We both have needed this deeper relationship, and this lunch was like “goodbye.”  So we’re sitting there and all of a sudden, there is a buzz in the restaurant.  And although it has become normal to see people staring at their phones as much as each other, it was much more than normal.  My back was to the TV, and so I read the news about the death of Prince on my phone.
 
I’ve never been a Prince fan. His music became popular when I started being a parent and pastor and kind of pulled away from my late adolescence. And yet I understand why so many grieve his death.  For many of us, music is something like the sound track of our life. It speaks to us on a level that is difficult to put into words.   My mom, who was almost 50, cried when Elvis died. How many of us can say where we were when John Lennon was shot? I listened to the Eagles for an hour or so after I heard of the death of Glenn Fry.  My kids still talk about the death of Kurt Cobain of Nirvana as a tragedy. Makes you wonder what all those Mozart fans went through. Perhaps Don McLean got something right in his song about the sudden death of Buddy Holly in his song “American Pie.”  
 
 I can't remember if I cried
 When I read about his widowed bride
Something touched me deep inside
The day the music died
 
Something touches us deep inside with the death of creative artists who have helped us connect with a deeper part of ourselves in a way that nothing else seemed to be able to do at the time.  What touches us is more than nostalgia or a longing for a second adolescence where we secretly listen to lyrics and tunes our parents do not like and cannot understand. What touches us deep inside is grief.
 
One of the things I’ve come to believe about an experience of grief is that it is very sensitive and connected.  One experience of grief can quickly and fully connect with another deeper, more personal sadness. The news of the death of Prince in the middle of saying goodbye to my “bro,” on the day before the anniversary of a tragic death in my life 40 years ago… was a trifecta of sorrow.
 
Grief is something we all walk through at a different pace…you never know from one person to the next where seemingly disconnected losses in a life may create a much larger wake in the depths of a soul.  We may think that some folks are a bit overreacting to the death of Prince, and we are tired of hearing about it all.  I’m just about there, to tell you the truth.  But I for one want to be patient for a few more days…I don’t know from one person to the next how this public experience of grief is touching someone I know deep inside in ways in which even they…cannot connect the dots.

This past Sunday more than a few people commented after the service that I seemed to have a “hitch in my giddy-up…”  They were right; a few months ago an MRI told me that I had slightly torn something called the meniscus on my left knee.  The word slightly only relates to the size of the damage, not the amount of the discomfort.  It really hurts…. Right now I’m in the middle of the treatment option that I understand as,  “let’s see how it goes.”  Well, it’s not going very well and although I know I sound like a whiner when I say it, “I’m frustrated!”
 
The frustration comes because I have to do so many things differently… more slowly… with an added attention… and not without some discomfort. There have been few days where a minute does not pass by that I don’t think about what is going on inside my left knee… and how is it going to get better. And no, I have not been on my bike in a month! 
 
What I want to focus on now is what occurred to me in the middle of the prayer time on Sunday morning. Like we do every Sunday morning, we had just finished sharing several significant prayer concerns. There were many more significant, life-altering concerns than my discomfort. There were even some life-threatening concerns.  As I was standing there with my knee throbbing, it occurred to me how concerns that are often raised in our time of prayer are things that can consume a life as my discomfort was attempting to consume me. 
 
I prayed out loud...a bit more passionately and by passionately I mean louder than usual (discomfort and pain will bring that out in most of us)…. “God, when something is wrong, when we are worried or sick or in pain or facing death, it consumes us!”   Praying in worship is a privilege and a challenge.  The challenge comes in being authentic without being self-centered. On Sunday I came close to that line.  I also experienced the sense that someone was listening to me. And in that moment…. in that prayer…. in that presence, it also occurred to me that we are never alone in our time of desperation and fear. 
 
Prayer is many things:  It is an attentiveness to the sacred and holy in our lives. Prayer is a desire of our hearts.  And when life hurts so much that the pain threatens to consume us and we cannot help but shout out our need, prayer is the sense that someone is listening.
 
Keep the Faith,
Pastor Dan