Our president talks trash Every. Single. Damn. Day.

Never in my lifetime has a man so diminished the office of president in such a short time.

Give him a chance, my conservative friends cry.

How many chances does this man need to act like a decent and kind human being?

The Scriptures tell us that you will know a man’s heart by the words that come spewing forth from his mouth. By now you should figure out that my heart is troubled, deeply, deeply troubled.

You should also know that Trump is an evil-hearted man.

Sister Tater called me this morning via Facetime. “What are you doing?” she asked. Sister Tater is undergoing surgeries for breast cancer so I am loathe to tell her anything negative these days but this morning, after Trump went off on a foul tweet storm aimed at a woman journalist I couldn’t help myself.

“I’m sitting here pondering the civil war that is surely coming to this country and worrying about our grandchildren,” I replied.

Sister Tater looked at me askance. She didn’t know about the tweetstorm.

Or the new ad from the NRA. The one that basically incites gun-owners to shoot protesters or anyone who disagrees with Trump.

Rather than telling her about all that in detail, I told my sis about a barge I saw on the Columbia River yesterday. Barges on the river are not an unusual sighting around here. But there is construction underway at the bridge that connects Oregon to Washington, so the traffic was moving slower, allowing more time for me to study the barge headed upriver.

It was heaped full of scraps of what appeared to be metal. Shiny strips forming a mound that rose above the container’s ridges. Maybe it wasn’t steel. I couldn’t be sure given the distance between us. But if it was scraps of steel, I worried about what if it overturned. How many fish would it kill? What about the birds? What sort of ecological disaster would such a thing incur?

Such is the mind of a writer. Always considering the obstacles and the possible solutions. Plot development, we call it.

The barge had to weigh several tons. And the current in the Columbia? Well, it’s infamous. Even on those smooth-as-glass days like yesterday, the river still is capable of knocking a person off their feet and swallowing them whole in a hot second. Kayaking against such a current will wear a person flat out.

You wouldn’t imagine that a little ole tugboat could push such a thing upriver. Yet it was. Seemingly effortlessly. The tug cut an unwavering path through that current, breezily pushing its heavy load. The tug was a whisper through the Gorge canyons.

Like the uttered prayers of the wholly devoted.

That’s what we need right now. The uttered prayers of the wholly devoted. We need to be as intentional as that tug about pushing all the junk upriver. Praying is the only thing that is going to enable us to fight the current of hate and vitriol and violence that is threatening to take this country under.

I don’t mean the pious prayers of the self-righteous.

I mean the desperate prayers of the wholly devoted.

It’s not enough to worry about Trump’s hate-filled tweets. Or the NRA’s despicable call to violence.

Prayer is the tugboat that will enable us to move against the current political crisis threatening our country, our way of life, our governing institutions.

Without the prayers of the wholly devoted, the threat to all of us increases daily, moment by moment.

Pray without ceasing for the task before us is great.

 Answer me when I call to you, my righteous God. Give me relief from my distress; have mercy on me and hear my prayer. Ps. 4:1 

Karen Spears Zacharias is author of CHRISTIAN BEND: A novel (Coming Sept. 2017 MUPress).