Her Name In My Mouth

She has tried four times and every single time it has gone the same way.

She sits down. She has decided beforehand, properly, that she is going to pray for this woman, because she knows the instruction and she has known it since she was about nine and she is not somebody who ducks a plain instruction.

She says the name.

And by about the eleventh second she is presenting evidence.

Not shouting. Not even, in her own estimation, being unfair. She lays it out. The sequence of what happened, and what was said in the second week, and the thing about the email, and the part that most people still do not know, and every single item is true, and she has checked.

She has done that four times, at four different sittings, over about a year, and by the end of each one she has felt worse than when she started, and has concluded that she is not ready.

That is the sentence she uses. I am not ready yet.

What she has begun to suspect, in the last month, is that the not being ready is not a stage. That it is not going anywhere on its own. That she could sit down four more times and produce four more cases, and that at some point a person has to notice that she has built a courtroom and has been calling it a prayer room for a year.

The harm was real. That is not in question and nobody has ever suggested otherwise, including the two people who know all of it.

Pray for them. It is a very short sentence.

Sit down with your tea, because the instruction here is famously hard and almost nobody notices how short it is.

But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.Matthew 5:44

Pray for them.

That is the whole clause. There is nothing after it. No requirement to have processed anything first, no clause about being ready, no instruction to reach a settled state about what they did, and no suggestion anywhere that the harm was not real. Bless them that curse you, He says, which means He knows exactly what they did.

Hear this at the table. You are not unready, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture hands the instruction to people who are still being used and still being persecuted, in the present tense, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a name out of a mouth that is not resolved about anything.

Now let me name what happens at the eleventh second, because you have watched it four times and it deserves a proper answer.

You are not praying and then drifting, and nothing in the written word calls it that, and the Holy Spirit has not filed it that way. You are doing two different things and only one of them is intentional.

The first is a woman saying a name to God. That takes about a second and a half.

The second is a woman assembling a true and complete account, which is what the mind does when it has been genuinely wronged and has never been able to put the account down anywhere. It is not malice. It is unfinished business looking for a court, and your prayer is the only room in your week where the case gets a hearing.

Hear this too, and let it change the sitting. You are not failing at forgiveness, and Scripture is what says so. What is written asks for prayer and never once asks for a resolved heart first, and the Spirit of God has heard every one of those four sittings, including the evidence, and has not marked one of them as a failed attempt.

And now what I am actually going to ask you to do, and it is smaller than any of the four attempts and it will work.

Say her name and then stop.

Do not add anything. Not a request, not a qualification, not one word about the situation. Say the name out loud, once, and then close your mouth and let three or four seconds go past.

Because the case cannot start if there is no second sentence.

You have never once tried it without a second sentence. Four attempts, four cases, and every single one of them began with the sentence after the name, and the written word never asked for a second sentence, and the Holy Spirit does not need one.