Every fall for many years, I have been reading the story of Kury to the incoming Kindergarten class. One chapter a week. We will probably finish around around Thanksgiving. The story starts where Kury’s dad dares to plant his yams with no prayers to the tribal gods. Instead he plants them in the name of Jesus.

Two women missionaries have come to the village to translate the Bible and tell the people about Jesus. Before the story starts, Kury’s Dad already believes, but Kury is not so sure.

Right now I’m at the part of the story where Kury gets a snake bite and he is sure that he’s going to die. He’s losing the feeling in his legs. The missionary ladies come and call for medical help to come by helicopter. Kury doesn’t know what a helicopter is. People are praying. Villagers come to look at him and say that it’s because of his father not planting his yams in the traditions. There is a storm. The sky needs to clear so the helicopter can reach them. Kury falls asleep, not knowing if he will ever wake up, inexplicably glad that his father has planted the yams in the new way. That’s the end of the chapter.

Spoiler alert: Kury doesn’t die, but don’t tell the Kindergarteners; we won’t get to that part of the story until October 2.

This part of the story makes me think back to the boy at our first summer camp in the Kaluga region of Russia. As our team was preparing to leave, the leaders called me and Jimmy into a room where a boy was lying on a bed, sick. They thought his sickness might be related to his aunt, who was a witch. He had never been around Christians. She was likely not happy about this. But it could also just have been a cold or fever or both. Either way, there was no doctor or nurse at the camp or in the churches behind the camp.

So we laid hands on the boy and prayed. We prayed not just for his illness, but for his soul. Then I had to go. I did hear a week or so later that the boy had recovered. In subsequent years, I have heard about several of the other children and camp staff through the years, but I never knew what happened to this particular child. Enough years have passed that this boy is a man now. He could be fighting in the war for all I know, on one side or the other. Or he could be a pastor.

The Kindergarteners will find out what happens to Kury in just a few days. I won’t find out what happened to that Russian boy probably until I get to heaven. But though I do not know, that does not mean that I should stop praying for him, because the One I am praying to knows and cares a lot more than I do.

In the missionary story I read every year, Kury and his family have funny names for Christian things. They call the Bible “God’s Carving.” They call prayer “God Talk," and I like that. It changes the point of view of prayer from me to God and who he is and what he has done and will do on earth as it is in heaven.

So now it is time for God Talk.

Father, maker, creator, orchestrator of all, you make. You know. You breathe; I breathe.
Son, shepherd, I sin; you die. I’m dirty; you wash. I stray; you find. You lift up lambs out of the briars and rocky crags they’ve stumbled upon. You rescue.
Spirit, flickering warming flame, you build the home in which I live. You laugh and love. No matter how far down the path I go, you are ahead of me and behind me.
Everywhere is not too far, always is not too soon, new is now. Too true to be true, yet truth unchanging and forever lives in you, is you, and in you I marvel and live this morning, this Saturday, this always.