For this last Christmas two dear friends gave us a valuable piece of bronze sculpture by Scott Rogers, the artist famous for capturing life in the American old West. This piece was inspired by the artist’s visit to the Cibolo Ranch near Marfa, Texas, originally built in 1850 by Milton Favor and restored by John Poindexter. While Rogers was exploring the adobe rooms-turned-museum in the ranch, he came across a simple “prayer chair”, once used in simple churches and pioneer homes as a place of prayer. Rogers said that the instant he learned the strange chair was used for prayer, he “knew that one day I would use it in sculpture.”
The night we received the gift, we brought the wrapped box home and opened it in our kitchen. Overwhelmed by the generosity of such treasured friends, we sat the sculpture on our kitchen island. There it stayed for a week while we discussed where we should place it, somewhere where it would be in the traffic of our daily life so we would naturally pass by it in the course of regular activities and thus see it often to remind us of our friends as well as of the importance of prayer.
Now, well into the new year, I thought maybe I’d send to our friends a snapshot of the sculpture in our home and say a second “thank you”. As I went to do this, I stopped to focus my camera on the art, but actually focused for the first time on its position in the room. We had placed it on a vintage victrola we have kept through the years because of Bill’s collection of recordings dating back to the 78RPMs he bought as a kid in love with music.
The victrola sits between our well-used grand piano and the grandfather’s clock the Gaither Music staff gave us early on when there were so few of us it was an exaggeration to call us a staff. Above the victrola was our all-time favorite collection of photos of our three now adult children.
As any parent knows, one never stops being a parent, even when children become peers and often wise advisors. What, when it’s all said and done, did we give our children? What do they still need that we can still give them? What of those things—from tennis shoes to a college education—will last when this home we built around them is gone and, as Carl Sandburg said, the grass has covered all.
I had not really noticed when we chose to put the sculpture on the victrola, but there it sat—a soul at prayer between the piano and the grandfather’s clock. What do we most hope we have given our children that we can still give now that they don’t need us as much as we need them?
We can give them music. We can give them our time. And prayer, we can give them prayer. These will take us all, joyfully singing, into forever, where the need for both prayer and time-counting will be no more.
