Prayer Opens Doors

The pastor spoke this morning  on the Disciples’ request to Jesus for  instructions on how to pray and when.  He  asked how many of his congregation prayed an hour a day which suddenly brought to my mind  events of 35 years ago when I had taken a sales position in  Southern California, representing a national vitamin manufacturer and was not doing a very great job of it. 

I  stood in the need of prayer and didn’t  know it, until I heard a radio program on the subject and listened to a well-respected doctor recite his experiences with prayer while doing his residency in a Chicago hospital years before.

At the time, my  immediate supervisor was West Coast Supervisor for this company, and was an ex-alcoholic with a disposition like an Africanized bee with a tongue like a buzz saw and  language like a dock hand! She thought nothing of calling me on a Sunday afternoon to unload a ton or two of venom and then hang up. 

I only applied for the position after I heard she had quit as the Western Sales Supervisor for this company, learning too late that she returned in the short time between my leaving my previous employer and coming to this company!  

Consequently, I was a little apprehensive about speaking up to her as I didn’t want to be totally out of both jobs.  Over the years when I had previously been a health food store supervisor, some of her earlier reps would stop by and fill me up with stories of her many meannesses  and weep on my shoulder just before she canned them. So it was a fluke that I had inherited her with the job  but here she was, back again and what was I to do?

This job required driving So. Cal freeways to the tune of 4,000 miles a month and making a minimum of eight store calls a day.  So what you do is pick a territory, drive to the furthest point in it and then work your way home, calling on stores as you come back.  I was not a salesman working on a commission so it was much later before I learned she got a percentage off any orders I picked up.   Company products were sold through the wholesale house, so my job was primarily to call  attention to specials and the like and suggest they could place the order through me to the wholesaler.

To survive these 4,000 mile jaunts each month I listened to my favorite Christian radio station KGER, which, if I remember correctly,  came from Long Beach with an interesting array of programming.  Perhaps it still does.  One morning I was struck by a story as relayed by an orthopedic surgeon from the City of Hope who lived in Newport Beach, fairly close to my own home in Costa Mesa.  At the time I knew his name but it escapes me now, all these years later. 

The doctor’s story as he told it was that he interned at a Chicago hospital where one day he took his day off to attend a conference of ministers.  One of the speakers reminded the ministerial audience that great men of the Church would pray on their knees for hours and days at a time, pulling all nighters was nothing to them.  He asked his audience, did any of them ever pray all night as had Luther, Wesley, and others of their day.

No one raised a hand.  So the Speaker kept reducing the time, from all night to half the night, or half the day.  Still no hands were raised.  Gradually as he reduced the prayer time, a few hands raised, and when he got to one hour a lot of hands were raised.  The surgical attendee thought he could do that and it wasn’t even his job! 

Recounting the event, the surgeon said it was the   middle of winter when he decided to pray at least one hour beginning at 5:00 AM., the only time he thought he could be sure of not being interrupted, taking it off his sleep time.  So he set his clock and went to bed.  To be sure this procedure would work, he set the clock on a dresser on the other side of the room.

The next morning the buzzer rang, reluctantly  he  stumbled across the cold unheated floor with every intention of turning off the alarm,and going back to bed. With his eyes closed  he reached out to slam his hand on it, but his hand   came down on the bristle end of his hair brush with the bristles piercing under his fingernails! He was awake! 

Bedside once again, the resident went through everything he could think of in his initial prayer  but found he had only used a couple of minutes, so he went through it again, adding as new thoughts came to him. 

As I recall his recollection he had to keep repeating the same things to fill up an hour, and even as I listened, driving the freeway, I was thinking, I can’t do it for an hour, but perhaps I  could for half-an hour.

The doctor continued his story of his efforts to pray for an hour and how he began looking for things to pray about, so started  to jot down on a pad in his pocket the things he felt needed the Lord’s attention, and in only two  short weeks he noticed things were going differently in the hospital.

I decided to give it that good old college try,  so  I shut off the TV at 9:00 PM and retired  to bedside to pray.  As the doctor before me, I had to search for things to fill up the allotted time and then I began to notice  changes taking place around me, particularly in how I responded to them.

One noticeable event occurred when against my wishes, my supervisor scheduled me for a trip to Las Vegas, although I didn’t tell her I didn’t want to go.  Although I did get mileage, as far as I was concerned there wasn’t any real compensation for driving alone from Orange County, CA to Las Vegas. NV, and I did not want to make the trip. 

Nevertheless, I was scheduled and  determined not to make a fuss, but  prepared for it.  Packed my cases and Sunday evening stowed them in the car for morning, but went to a prayer meeting at church that evening before returning home to bed. 

6:15 AM Monday morning the phone rang as I prepared to leave the house, and, of course, it was Margaret, my supervisor.  She informed me the wholesaler’s rep had been in Vegas the preceding week, returning Saturday, and had sold the “heck” out of our products (that wasn’t the word she used) but I was not to take that as an excuse for not making any sales!  Bolstered by my prayers, I said, “Frankly, Margaret, the car is ready and I am ready, but I really don’t care to make the trip.” 

“What?” she screeched across the miles, “Then don’t go,” she said, slamming the receiver.

“Now you’ve done it, Lord,”  I said sitting back in dismay.  “Now I’ve got to go somewhere I didn’t plan on and I’ll have to make sales.”  Even as I said it, I thought,  I have never gone into downtown Los Angeles where there are a few big stores, so guess I’ll head for LA. 

Do I need to tell you I turned in the best sales day I  had to date?

The months passed and  I rocked along with Margaret, until the day I took charge of the conversation when I said in a forceful but  conversational tone, “Margaret, this is a business arrangement, not personal.  I don’t care to  be spoken to as you are in the habit of doing.  If you can’t address me in normal tones of voice,  without all the cuss words, don’t call me.  I will not be reduced to tears as you always did all my predecessors, but I will quit.” There was a moment of silence when this quiet voice said she objected to being told how she could speak to me.  “Margaret, you can speak to me any way you want to, but you wouldn’t  dare to speak to Mr. (the prexy, but whose name I now forget) that way, so why do you speak to me that way?  Am I not worthy of respect too?” 

So it wasn’t prayer changing Margaret as much as it was changing me, and giving me the chutzpa to speak up and demand respect from her. She ceased to harass me so we had some reasonably normal conferences over events.  Eventually by now 3 years later,  she became ill and went to the hospital where she went into a coma.  I went down to visit and seized the opportunity to read aloud Romans 10:9 along with the 23rd Psalm. 

I have been told people in comas may not be able to answer but they can hear, as I knew from years before at my father’s bedside when I took my minister to read Scripture to him, a professed atheist, and then asked if he accepted Christ as Lord and Savior.  I was holding my father’s hand and felt the slightest squeeze to my grip and knew he had heard and acknowledged his acceptance, so I felt sure Margaret heard  as well. She passed away soon afterward.

Some time later, I paid a visit to one of Margaret’s favorite customers, a woman in North Hollywood who had in turn many movie people as customers, and for whom  I put on a demonstration of some product or other.  As I was wrapping up and preparing to leave, she asked if she could ask me something.  Of course, I agreed she could, and then she said, “How did you manage to stay with Margaret so many years when no one else could?”

I laughed, and told her, “I prayed a lot!”