Daddy, I have to go to the potty.

Please humor me as I go spiritual on you for a moment…something happened with my little girl that I’ve got to share with you.

Early this morning I woke, as I often do, to the sweetest of sounds. My groovy little four-year-old angel Lyda calling out to me in her sing-song sweetness, “Da-ddy…Da-ddy…Da-ddy…Daddy…” I was stone cold asleep, so it took me a second to register the voice. I stumbled into her room in the pre-dawn darkness and she whispered, “I have to go to the potty.”

We shuffled together into the bathroom, and I waited with her in the dark. When she finished, I carried her back to bed and lay her down and she whispered, “I love you, daddy.” Then she disappeared under the sheets and fell right back to sleep.

I, on the other hand, was pretty much awake, so I decided to take advantage of the quiet and the stillness and do something for me. I wasn’t sure what that was, so I paced around for awhile and looked out the windows on the sleeping world, when suddenly something semi-profound dawned on me – what just happened between Lyda and me is exactly what happens when we pray.

It goes something like this…When we call out to whomever it is we call out to in times of need or times of ecstatic gratitude, we do so like a little child calls out to her daddy. Whether your God is a He or a She or Something-in-between, you call out in complete certainty that you will be heard and that your God will come running to whisk you off to the potty or meet whatever need you have. Sometimes it takes persistence and repetition, or even constant nagging, but if we don’t let up and never waiver in our faith that there will be an answer, our God shuffles into our lives and embraces us and says “My dear child, what is it? I’ll do anything for you.”

This morning I knew what I was called to do. I sat on the couch and creaked into a quasi-lotus. Just sit. Be still and know God. Then, as I breathed deeply in and out, I called out in a whispy sing-song voice, “Daddy…Daddy…Daddy…Daddy.”