Someone Must've Been Praying for Me
Ben Rector writes songs for middle-aged people.
This has got to be as good as it gets / ’cause it feels like fiction / Little footsteps running to kitchen / Long nights of running on the highway / Turned into a couple bikes in the driveway / Living that pipe dream / I'm doing better than I ought to be / Of all lives that I could have lived in / When I see this one I've been given, I think…—Ben Rector (featuring Mat Kearney), “Praying for Me,” The Richest Man in the World
When it comes to lyrical stickiness, Ben Rector is Mr. Reliable.
My first exposure was in 2016, when I saw him play the Tennessee Theatre with a friend who had a spare ticket. Though I hadn’t heard of Ben before, I walked away impressed by two things: the dude’s Picasso-level skills on the keys, and the number of very fine women he attracted to his shows.
When I found my own fine woman to attend shows with a year later (sorry, Josh), I made her playlists that I’d fill, week after week, with love songs. In them, I included at least four of Rector’s tunes: “When I’m With You,” “I Like You,” “Wildfire,” and “Forever Like That.” Haley’s new playlist, which I’ve been curating since we traded vows, contains one more Rector tune: “It Would Be You.”
As we matured—Rector is just a year older than I am—so did the lyrical content of his records, branching off from love songs into reflections about growing up, screwing up, being a good dad, and finding wonder in the ordinary.
In 2018, when I was thinking of a way to write the story of how badly I missed my best friends and the time we spent together as children, he released “Old Friends,” which inspired the story “Fàilte gu Alba.”
In 2022, he released “Heroes” just at a time when I was feeling nostalgic about the men I’d idolized in the past, before discovering that sports stars cheat, trust is broken, and even the best mentors blow up their marriages for the most selfish reasons. (“I miss my old heroes / I had to give them all away / I miss my old heroes / God I wish they would’ve stayed”).
Last fall, I wrote members of my Attic Club about time spent with my boys and the kind of father I’d like to become, inspired by the Rector-Thomas Rhett collaboration “What Makes a Man.” (“Sometimes I wonder / What they’ll say of me when I am gone / When my daughter’s living on / Will she care if strangers thought that I was famous / Or just that I was never home?”).
On his latest record, The Richest Man in the World, Rector writes songs about gratitude and family. The most touching is “Praying For Me,” his collaboration with Mat Kearney. You can read the full lyrics here.
I’ve never been what born-again religious folks call a prayer warrior. If you ask me to, I’ll pray for you, probably once, on the spot, then forget by the next morning what you asked me for. But, regardless of what you believe about speaking with God, I know I’ve been as much a beneficiary of divine intervention as the Argentine national soccer team in 2022.
The only earthly reason I claim to be a Christian is because another culturally Catholic friend, whose family converted to the faith when we were 10, prayed for me. And when, at 17, I finally showed an interest because of History Channel documentaries about demons and angels, he gave me a Bible that I kept in my locker until months later, when Adam’s grandpa died. If it were not for Jeremy preaching the good news through the Book of Job, perhaps the only instance ever recorded in which God used the tale of a dude who loses everything ‘just because’ to save a person’s soul, as we drove to a Polish cemetery in Pennsylvania for the funeral, I would have a much different life today1.
Maybe I would be more famous. Maybe I would’ve gone to Oberlin and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and gotten a book deal and dated many beautiful, bronze-skinned women from Europe, Latin America, and Asia, like a literary 007, and owned a condo by the sea and a cabin in the mountains from which I’d write my bestsellers.
Or maybe—much more likely—I’d be an embittered man, with a cold heart, writing angry letters to agents and ex-wives, with no warm, patient woman to wrap in my arms at night and children to practice single-leg takedowns with in the morning.
You know those people who say, “I could use some prayer.” Yeah, that’s me, every day. And if it weren’t for the prayers of many faithful friends, starting with Jeremy, God only knows what kind of quicksand I’d be stuck in.
I hope you all had a wonderful Father’s Day, whether you were celebrating or being celebrated, on Sunday. I was blessed with a double celebration: with family on the Lord’s Day, and on Saturday eating Chinese buffet, watching The Life of Chuck, and preparing to launch a new project called Almanac of the Overlooked.
The new Substack will complement the personal writing I do here. If you’d like, go ahead and subscribe. I’ll begin populating it with stories of underdogs, lost words, and other buried treasures over the next weeks.
For now, go listen to “Praying For Me,” and, if you can’t think of anyone else to pray for, shoot one up to the Big Man for me.
Before you leave, support my work by upgrading to a paid subscription for as little as $4.17/month ($50/year). You can also buy me a coffee, order a copy of either my first story collection or my epic Ping-Pong novella, or listen to my stories on YouTube and Spotify.
I’ve never laid out the story of my conversion. The closest to that story may be “The Prophet Bilal Moreno,” in which I mused about what I misunderstood and the melancholy of not becoming who you thought God wants you to be. But, yeah, I asked Jeremy, and later Filipe, a bajillion questions about suffering, justice, Republicans, The Da Vinci Code, premarital sex, the Holy Trinity, and other stuff. And even though it made so sense, and I doubt any TV preacher would recommend the method, the idea that implanted itself deepest in me was found in Job: that I am small and not in control of anything, and that there is someone who is, of joy as much as pain.