The Kingdom Comes First

What I got wrong (and what God gets right)

2003.

Peeling carrots in the kitchen with André, understanding half of his jokes but laughing anyway. Helping Bernard wake up, find his teeth, tug on sagging socks each morning. Caring for Claude as she healed from infection, applying ointment tenderly after every bath. Listening to Philippe’s same stories over after breakfast, carrying his soaked sheets to the dingy basement laundry again and again.

Most people outside the doors of L’Arche would have thought those people might be better off not born, or institutionalized, or shut away.

But within the walls of that holy, half-crumbling old house, I glimpsed it for the first time. An upside-down way of life where the last and lost and forgotten went first.

I had spent the previous 22 years of my life seeking, striving, succeeding—and until I did nothing noteworthy for a year, stripping beds and ironing sheets and pushing wheelchairs and brushing other adults’ teeth, I never realized I had every equation wrong.

The kingdom comes first.

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2023.

Conservative tallies would estimate I have prayed the Our Father thousands of times in my forty-two years. But until the worst news in the holiest of weeks shattered every last one of my plans, I missed the truth I had mumbled every time I prayed the words Jesus gave us.

The kingdom comes first.

I always thought the will mattered most. The primacy of divine direction and power. Will, like a sharpened sword pointing where to go. Will, like a wielded force overriding human foolishness. Will, like an angry god shaking fists at mere mortals.

Why did it take me so long to hear what we spoke?

Thy kingdom come. Only then thy will be done.

Humans get hung up on God’s will. Of course we do, obsessed with our own power and plans, our knowledge and needs. God’s will looms as a barrier to our own. What must I surrender in order to be good or right? How can I make cosmic stars align with my own desires?

As conscious creatures we grow consumed by questions and lust for answers. Prayer become a tangled litany of conflict, the exercise of every list of literature’s timeless tussles: humans versus self, humans, nature, society, or God.

What does God want me to do? How does God let this happen? Why won’t God intervene?

I have jumped on this maddening merry-go-round a thousand times, and I bet you have held on tight, too. But the first time I prayed the Our Father at church after I was diagnosed with cancer, my head snapped to attention like whiplash.

Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done.

I had missed it all along.

The kingdom comes first.

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2024.

I picture the party so often it feels like a memory. Our backyard in summer decadence, tomatoes thick on the vine, flowers bursting from the gardens. Music and food and dancing, everyone we love, everyone who helped, all of us hugging and laughing. I have hair again, and lightness in my step. It is a better party than our wedding, because the children are there too, and everything is sweetness.

Some days I can taste it, the celebration at the end. Thy kingdom come.

Right now it’s easy to brood over God’s will. Why did God let this happen? When will God heal? What does God have in store for what comes next? 

But the kingdom comes first. I cannot hold fast to anything but this.

Oh, we of little faith. We think our prayers are prescriptive, don’t we? That they will compel the divine to act as we want. But instead this prayer—and perhaps every other we fling like arrows of hope to the heavens—is descriptive. The words do not determine God; they remind us who God already is.

Jesus gave the words to his friends in the midst of the in-breaking of the kingdom—which he was himself. The truth of the kingdom coming first was no chastisement but a holy reminder, shimmering like stars.

The kingdom is already coming. The kingdom is already among you. 

Because the kingdom IS God’s will. The doublet we pray is an echo, an affirmation, an exultation. God’s will is that the kingdom comes.

Even at the end of the prayer, the closing we say together in worship, we still keep the kingdom first: For the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours, now and forever.

(Imagine that. Even power and glory come second.)

Right now people love to pray for/with/at me: Thy will be done.

No, I think. We have the order all wrong. Pray first for the Kingdom to come. Pray for everything broken to be made whole. Pray for the sick to be healed, the lost to be found, the sorrowful to be comforted, the last to be first—pray for all that.

Then we will discover God among us, all along.

May we never isolate God’s will to the impossible heights of perfection, the unlucky dump of misfortune, the cruel shoulder of indifference, or the terrible sword of condemnation.

May we find the kingdom coming among us, in laughing babies who almost weren’t born, in friends whose forgiveness brought new life, in the holy effervescence of music and story, in the quiet delight of expectations turned upside down, in the hope of healing and steps toward recovery, in life’s scrappy resilience like dandelions through concrete.

Seek what comes first, and the rest will follow.

What more could we want than a kingdom like that?