God Likes Me More Than You
THE CHEEKY TITLE I’VE GIVEN THIS little ditty of an essay was likely born from some childhood memory when snotty me was tormenting my little brother in hopes of getting a tortured apology or finally admitting to himself and me that I was his superior in all things excluding BMX bikes which I didn’t care about anyway. In short; ‘Mom likes me more than you anyway so you should do whatever I want.’ At that point in my puerile life, our mom presented as a lunch preparing, stop leaving towels on the floor kind of deity. Me to little brother: I’m Mom’s favorite, so shut your pie hole.
Last week for some odd reason I went down scores of rabbit trails on my phone and ended up at a website called The Journal of Petrology. Petrology is the study of rocks, and gravel notwithstanding, it’s turns out they’re really interesting.
Rocks travel down rivers and springs shedding particles, bouncing off the muck and sediment of the Amazons and Niles and Thames and backyard streams of the world to join the multitude of particles already being bludgeoned by the high tide froth of waves and turbulent storms in the great maw of oceans. As they travel, the stones break into infinitesimal bits. Quartz, feldspar, and moonstone join bits of what Science Friday says were once white sea urchin spines and striped mollusks, things that have been floating around in the ocean for centuries. Altogether, they become sand.
I’ve always loved the solitary moments I find myself in. I’ll wander out of Concrete Life -- I mean that literally as well as figuratively – and begin dragging downed branches onto a pile of wood in the far back of our yard and feel compelled to duck under a certain overgrown holly tree to look for fox dens and deer scat. Sometimes I’ll pray in the periphery (maybe you understand what I mean here), which on a good day turns into full out praying, which was what I was doing a year or so ago when I had the audacity to begin asking God to be his favorite. What started out as a knatty little prayer turned into me pleading to the point of tears to be his favorite child. And for your sake and mine allow me to intentionally let slip that he said yes.
In the Bible sand is used to describe vast amounts of people. The mass of us. Altogether we are as numerous as the sand. The Bible also tells us God loves us completely, which by my lights implies he doesn’t play favorites. Probably if we were sitting together having coffee you’d wholeheartedly agree. Of course he doesn’t play favorites, we’re all his children and what good parent would favor one child over another. Then, at least to yourself inside your own head, you’d maybe roll your eyes, and especially if you’d been able to telepathically hear my prayers that day I was looking for dear scat, you’d probably roll your eyes halfway out of your head.
In the house our kids grew up in we had a small playroom with one toybox and a TV sans cable that on clear days broadcast hazy episodes of Barney and Sesame Street. Unlike today, when genius parents began knocking down kitchen walls, our playroom wasn’t visible from the kitchen when I was cooking or tethered to the phone on the wall. It was in this playroom where our kids, consciously or subconsciously, busied themselves with the futile nonsense of sibling rivalry. Enough time on the phone or burning grilled cheese and all hell broke loose. Mothers don’t need Cliff Notes to understand The Lord of The Flies.
Sometimes at bedtime, after a rainy-day building Lego cities or making up plays with protagonists and antagonists, one of our kids would say I was favoring one of their siblings. Of course I would say no, absolutely not, I love you all the same. But then after pulling the covers up, kissing their forehead, and gently pulling the door shut, my words somehow felt flat, like our kids were all one lump sum, like I was a nursery teacher handing out an equal amount of graham crackers to a group of toddlers at snack time. I did love them all the same of course, but I think what they wanted was more intimate than that, I think what they wanted was to be my favorite.
But the truth was they really were my favorite child and I wanted to say it out loud. I wanted so much to hug them and tell them they were my favorite, so much so that one night I actually did. But six words into Oh precious, you are my favorite, I knew I was in trouble, and if it’s possible to pray in your head as actual words are coming out of your mouth I must have, because the next thing I said was something along the lines of you’re my favorite oldest girl, or my favorite middle child, or my favorite son — the words came out of my mouth like they were there all along but I just hadn’t known how to articulate them. And it turns out they were so dang true; ‘You’re my favorite girl who reads 7 books a week, my favorite girl who loves Frodo, my favorite boy that jumps on the trampoline inside cardboard boxes.’ I’d just figured out how to articulate the reality that one of the great joys of having children is that they’re so different it kind of blows your mind and makes it impossible not to favor each one of them.
Psalm 136 tells us that God knit us together in our mother’s womb and created our inmost being. And Psalm 64:8 says “Yet you, Lord, are our Father / We are the clay, you are the potter and we are all the work of your hand.” And as God is famously creative he makes us wildly different. Potters don’t make the same bowl over and over again and babies don’t wiggle around in wombs for nine months in choreographed movements.
Back to my non-sequitur that isn’t really a non-sequitur: petrology. We are as numerous as the sand and as different from each other as the ridges and curves and the shades of light reflected in pieces of mollusks as old as the earth, quartz that’s traveled untold currents in untold streams, moonstone’s translucent core. Under a microscope we are not flat. Magnify us and we are God’s favorite nine-year-old boy that goes to sleep counting the stars he sees out his window, his favorite daughter who at one particular moment looked for dear scat under a holly tree.
