The Prayer Chain and the Birthday Party

The woman from church found me in the cereal aisle on a Thursday afternoon, and she put her hand on my arm like I had just come home from a funeral.

“Oh, honey,” she said. “We’re all praying. Every one of us.” Then she looked down at my son, who was sitting in the cart, and she said his name very slowly, the way you talk to someone who doesn’t speak English.

“Hi, Eli. Are you being a good boy for Mommy?”

Eli did not look at her. He was holding a box of Cheerios and turning it in his hands so the barcode faced him, then the side panel, then the barcode again.

He had done that with every box we passed since we came in the door.

I said thank you, because that is what you say. I said we were fine.

I pushed the cart toward the dairy case, and the whole way down the aisle I could feel her watching us go.

I didn’t understand it yet. I thought maybe somebody had seen Eli lie down flat in the grass at the Fall Festival when the noon siren went off.

Then my phone buzzed in my coat pocket. It was a text from Ben’s cousin Kim, who lived in Waukon and went to the same church we did when she bothered to go.

“Did you know about this?” she wrote. Under it was a screenshot of an email, the kind I had seen a hundred times since I married into the Nygaard family seven years ago.

The subject line said Prayer Chain, Wednesday. It had gone out the morning before, from my mother-in-law’s email address, the one with the cardinal picture next to it, to the whole list.

The list was 140 people. I knew because Donna had told me once, proudly, at Easter. One hundred and forty souls, she said, and most of them pray the same hour the email comes in.

There were four requests that week. A man named Jeff having a knee replaced in Decorah. The Olsons’ new grandbaby. Rain for the late beans, which made me smile even then. And the third one down.

“Please pray for little Eli Nygaard, who has been diagnosed with autism, and for his mother Jessica, who is struggling. Pray for patience and for God’s healing on that family.”

I stood in the dairy aisle of our little grocery with a gallon of two percent in one hand and my phone in the other, and I read it four times.

That was the first time in my life I understood that a kind thing and a cruel thing can be the same thing, depending on who gets to say it.