Kevin and the Seven Prayers
An inspirational story by Poet & Storyteller Anne McCrady
©2002 InSpiritry® Publishers

EAST OF THE SUN AND WEST OF THE MOON, in a land far away—and yet not so far—there was a country in which hatred and distrust grew in the hearts of the people until killing became the only answer. Darkness descended on the land like a night of evil. Tools were replaced by weapons. Villages were attacked without warning. Fires burned where houses once stood. Fathers and mothers stopped their lives to mourn the loss of their children, and everywhere families buried their dead.

Now in this place of awful terrors lived a young man named Kevin. In the beginning, Kevin was like all the rest of the people of his country: peace-loving and fearful of fighting back against the cruel troops who came like cowards in the night to take brothers and fathers from villages all across the land. More than most though, Kevin was angry with God, who seemed to have forgotten his people and left them to the torture of these murderers.

Each afternoon when the men and women of his village gathered quietly in prayer, Kevin knelt outside his simple home. There, as witness to his grief, he shouted up at God to save his people from a bloody death by heartache. Desperately, he cried out his anger and his pain, palms up, head back, eyes staring out at heaven, begging for God's mercy.

Day by day, Kevin watched as the armies of the enemy wrought new terrors, new anguish. And then one day, they came for him.

A group of men he did not know surrounded him and chained his hands and feet. The hatred in their eyes told him all he had to know: he had challenged them one too many times with his public outcries every day. His angry screams were words too close to courage, and so they came that moonless night to put him where no one could hear his wild laments...his only crime, his hopelessness.

They took him far away from all he knew to an old stone building, crumbling with the burden of the lives lost there. His cell, a meager space, had cold stone walls, a packed dirt floor and a tiny window at one end. The room was dark and damp and mean. There was no furniture save a wooden bed, which Kevin found as his lifeless knees buckled with the weight of where he was.

Alone in the slanted light tilting through the window bars, Kevin hated God and man and life. Disgusted, he slid his knees onto the floor, head back, eyes close this time, arms stretched out wide, the cell so cramped that one arm stuck out the tiny window between the iron bars.

Sobbing, Kevin screamed at God for all that he had seen and heard, for all the pain and suffering, for all the nights and days of hate. Then, breathless from his wild assault, he fell asleep pleading with God to send some sign of hope.

The First Prayer

That first night trapped within the desperate solitude of the prison, exhausted from his angry prayers, Kevin slept a wretched sleep, but in the morning, he awoke to bright light splashing through the bars into his cell. Sunrays danced across the dusty air and fell on a small chip of stone laying against one corner of the walls. It was just a pale white stone, but Keith the reflection of the sun's warmth, it glowed in the gloomy cell.

Kevin remembered gathering such stones as a child. He and the other boys in his village had played a game of numbers, using the stones to mark their progress on the dark, flat rocks in the field where they once were safe enough to play just beyond the village. He reached to pick up the stone and fingered it like a treasure.

This was it! This was his sing: a gift! God had heard his pleas for mercy and had offered him this gift!

This white stone would be his pen, his sword. He would write to God—real words, real prayers. If God would keep him here, then he must find a reason to survive. God had answered him once; he might again!

Later, people might call his words "crazy" or "desperate" or "inspired." For now, he only knew that he had to find a way to speak his hopes.

That day, Kevin's first words were scratched into the stone wall opposite his bed, so that he could see them as his eyes opened in the morning and shut at night.

It was a simple prayer:

Dear God,
astound me with your plans for me.

The Second Prayer

The next day Kevin prayed, his posture no different than before: kneeling, eyes closed arms out, palms up, one hand between the window bards, but as he poured out the tired suffering of his angry heart to God, it felt as if there were something on his outstretched hand.

He stopped his ranting long enough to look. He blinked his eyes, for, there beyond the prison bars, yes, there outside his prison cell, a small, gray bird had landed on his open palm. She hopped about, then bent, depositing a piece of dried brown grass on his cupped finger tips. Kevin was unsure of what to do, and so he froze, his prayers suspended in midair. The tiny bird landed again, this time with a beggar's bit of odd, black thread.

Kevin was amazed (No, he was astounded!) to realize that the bird might build a nest in his very hand. He didn't move. The bird was still; it did not even see him there behind the bars.

"This creature," he thought, "has found with me a sheltered space away from war! For him, I'll find a servant love. This surely is God's answer to my prayer!"

And so he left his arm there...for the bird.

The next day, with his outstretched hand still cupping twigs and fluffy stuff woven together into a nest, Kevin's arm began to ache, his knees to bind. With his one free arm, he took his stone and wrote his second earnest prayer, scratched on the wall behind his bed:

Spirit of my Spirit, let me rest
only when your work is done.

The Third Prayer

The war raged on in Kevin's land. News came with men brought to the prison from the fighting: villages were being burned and young men taken to be killed or kept where they were worse than dead. Kevin longed to know what God's plan could be and grieved for all the hate the world was asked to bear.

Day after day, the bird who had found refuge in a young man's love went about her work, coming and going with gatherings. In Kevin's hand, the loose tangle grew into a perfect nest, gray feathers filling the inner hollow.

And with the bird for company and strength, Kevin's anger with God softened as he prayed each day the prayers he had written on the walls.

The bird began to spend more and more time on her nest each day. Then one bleak afternoon when Kevin's heart was full of doubt, Kevin felt the warmth beneath the bird change from feathery heartbeat to heavy heat. Four brown eggs were laid within the softest spot! His fingers cupped around them as he cried!

Already intrigued with Kevin's daily prayer routine, the prison guards were now amazed to see his dedication to this bird and her tiny, fragile eggs. First making sure his plate was placed so that he could eat with his one free hand, now they helped move his bed so that he could sleep against the wall, his arm resting on the window sill.

Filled with compassion for the lives inside the eggs, Kevin understood God's boundless love. The tender third prayer came to him:

Lord, let me never close my hand
or turn my back to you.

The Fourth Prayer

Some days as Kevin sat with his arm outstretched to hold the bird and her nest of eggs, his arm and hand throbbed with need to give up his selfless scheme. But even in his pain, his dedication to this work had brought a change. Kevin had stopped screaming up at God! Now when he prayed, he whispered so as not to scare the bird.

Outside the thunder of war roared on, and on some windy days, it filled the space of Kevin's cell. He ached to hold his family close or to see the friends he knew must now be gone. God's plan seemed distant, hard and vague.

Over the next few weeks, the bird sat hours on her nest. The eggs began to move and crack. Then, small, wet creatures squirmed within his grasp and four new baby birds were his to love! Kevin could feel the tiny beaks and feet in his crusty hand, though his arm, having been extended out the window for all these days, was growing numb.

At night, he thought about how much he loved the miracle of the new lives in his hand, but still he longed for his own life outside the prison walls. His mind was flooded with questions:

Where were peace and hope and love?

Why must life be difficult?

How could God expect so much of him?

The fourth prayer came from the depth of Kevin's broken heart:

All-Knowing God, let me recognize
your wisdom even in my pain.

The Fifth Prayer

The prison guards kept Kevin fed and talked to him about the country he once knew. The asked about his God and how he found the strength to love in the midst of all the hate. Kevin spoke of the peace he dreamed to know again and of a God who can astound even an angry man.

The days were long; the pain intense. Kevin listened to the baby birds, as they squeaked and squawked. For comfort, he would sing with them during sunny days, and when they fell quiet after dark, he thanked God for their tiny lives.

Sometimes the birds made his sorrow worse. When the growing birds, their fluff yielding to slick gray feathers, called to the mother in confusion and hunger as she left to search for food, Kevin cried. He could not bear their frantic songs as they watched the sky for her return.

Of course, she always came, but the babies reminded him of himself. Kevin thought about how, in the early days of this senseless war, with his anger drumming in his heart, he must have looked just like those birds as he had screamed for God to come to him. Kevin understood how God must have felt looking down at a boy with his own frail fears. Kevin leaned toward the window frame, pushed close so that the closeness of his breath might warm and soothe the baby birds...and God felt closer too.

The fifth prayer came one night at dusk, this time written on the ceiling just above his head:

Oh, God, keep me always looking up.

The Sixth Prayer

The spring rains came, and Kevin's skin was cracking with the weather's wear. The guards found oil to soothe his pain, and Kevin never once complained or offered to give up his work. By now Kevin was a different man. He had gained the joy of an open heart, but there had been loss too. His arm had become a useless rod, a dry numb stump, a hard tree limb.

Before too long, the baby birds in Kevin's hand began to test their wings. By now, with the birds' glad freedom songs, Kevin's heart had learned to sing its own new psalm. As he watched in delight, the birds hopped up along the side of the tattered nest to flap their adolescent wings and prepare for flight.

Finally, one day as Kevin dreamed of someday going home, one of the tiny birds lifted itself into the air above the nest and moved away. As the mother fluttered overhead, each baby found its way to follow until all of them were gathered in a bush nearby.

Kevin watched with joy from between the bars and felt the lightened load of the nest without the birds inside. It suddenly brought a new fear to his heart: he didn't want to be alone! He was relieved by their return just before dark.

After that, the birds flew further each day as their wings grew strong. They spent the warm days following their mother, as she taught them to find food, but always at night they gathered back in Kevin's hand.

By the time, the sixth set of words were scrawled, Kevin had begun to fancy himself a poet, so his prayer, written just above the window of his cell, was a celebration:

Lord, such joy you have let me see.
Even in bondage, I can be free!

The Seventh Prayer

One evening, as Kevin said his evening prayers and thanked God for the wonder of his life, he had a sudden sense of sadness. Then he knew the reason for this thoughts. It was almost dark, and the birds had not returned to him as was their way at dusk each day!

Kevin waited, whispering his prayers with his arm outstretched as it had been for endless weeks, the ragged nest still in his hand. The stars blinked through the deepening night. There was no sign of the small feathered creatures he had grown to love.

Resigned, Kevin laid his head against his lifeless arm as he had done so many nights. He slept and dreamed that God could speak to him in birdsong.

The next morning, Kevin was awakened by a storm of banging and shouting. His jailers came. A treaty had been signed, they said, the war was done! He was being released! Without a word, Kevin looked out at the empty nest and at the sun-splashed sky beyond. He thought about the wonder he had seen. He knew this work was finished.

Slowly, agonizingly, Kevin pulled the plank that was his arm into his cell between the iron window bars, still holding the delicate grassy nest. With his other hand, he lifted the empty home from the flat palm of his helpless arm and set it in the corner of the prayer-filled cell that the next visitor might share his dreams.

Kevin sat and read the messages he had written on the walls. Smiling, he thought about the days and nights he had spent here, letting go of a young man's rage and finding a simple servant's heart. With his one good hand, he picked up the small, white stone one final time and wrote the seventh prayer on the wall beside the open door:

Holy One, may my happy heart
always lead my failing feet back to you

Turning, Kevin left his cell to begin his long walk home, the withered hand of his arm swinging loose beside him, but a new hope on his tired face.

The Return Home

As Kevin walked home, all along the way, people he had never met stood in the dust along the road, to watch him pass. They had come to see the young man often told about by prison guards, the man whose anger had imprisoned him, who punishment for wanting peace was peace itself, whose life had become a miracle when a bird had lived in his open, outstretched hand. As Kevin came to his village home, men who knew him stared and women cried. They whispered how God had worked a miracle in that prison cell, how in losing the use of his arm, Kevin had gained the power of his heart. They also spoke about his seven prayers left etched in the stone of the prison walls:

Dear God, astound me
with your plans for me.

Spirit of my Spirit, let me rest
only when your work is done.

Lord, let me never close my hand
or turn my back to you.

All-Knowing God, let me recognize
your wisdom even in my pain.

Oh, God, keep me always looking up.

Lord, such joy you have let me see,
even in bondage, I can be free.

Holy One, may my happy heart
always lead my failing feet back to you.

No longer was Kevin the angry, fearful youngster screaming his disappointments to the sky, but instead he had become a sign of hope, a saint, a man of God. Later, Kevin's story was told and retold by anyone who spoke of war and to folks who faced their own dark days. Those who knew him best say that throughout his life, Kevin walked a road of peace and joy, beloved and blessed by all he met, known across the land as:

Kevin of the Seven Prayers