I Do Not Know What To Ask For Her

She has known her for twenty two years, which is why this is so difficult.

Because she knows too much. If she knew less she could pray something general and go to bed.

Instead she knows the history behind the situation, and the part everybody outside the family gets wrong, and the two things her friend has said in the last decade that turned out later to have been the important ones.

And she cannot work out what would actually help.

She has tried. She sat down properly in March and got as far as: Lord, please let her. And then stopped, because the obvious thing to ask for is not obviously good, and the thing that looks like the answer would cost her friend something that she is not sure her friend can afford to lose, and the alternative might be worse.

She has run four different versions and every one of them has a hole in it.

So she has stopped asking for anything. Not deliberately. What has actually happened is that she has begun to think about her friend at the times she used to pray for her, which is a subtly different activity and produces nothing at all except a heaviness she carries around during the day.

Last week she said out loud, to the kitchen: I do not know what to ask for you.

And then she felt bad about that too, because it sounded like an excuse, and because a woman of her age with her history should be better at this by now.

He tells us that he prayed. He does not tell us what he asked.

Sit down at the table, because there is a line in Philippians that is quoted constantly and which nobody notices is missing something.

Always in every prayer of mine for you all making request with joy.Philippians 1:4

Always. Every prayer. Making request with joy.

Now look for the request.

It is not there. He does not say what he asked. Across four letters, in the places where he tells churches he is praying for them, he names the people, and he names the joy, and again and again he does not itemize.

The thing he wants them to know is that they are in his mouth. Not what he is asking for.

Hear this in your own kitchen. You are not failing at this, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture shows an apostle reporting the prayer without reporting the request, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a name lifted with nothing attached to it and knows exactly what to do with it.

Now let me name what has actually stopped you, because it is not indifference and it is not laziness.

It is love plus knowledge, and that combination produces paralysis in exactly this way.

You know enough to see that every obvious request has a cost attached. Somebody who knew less would ask for the obvious thing and sleep well. You cannot, because you can see three moves ahead, and every one of those boards has something bad on it.

That is not a defect in your praying. That is what twenty two years of knowing somebody does to you, and it is a form of love, and it has been misfiled as a failure since March.

Hear this too, and let it release something. You are not required to know, and Scripture is what says so. What is written has the Spirit Himself interceding with groanings that cannot be uttered because we do not know what we should pray for as we ought, and the Spirit of God has never once needed a correct request handed in before He would work.

And now the heaviness you have been carrying around in the day, because that is the actual cost of the last few months and I want it named.

What you have been doing instead of praying is worrying, in the same slot, at the same times, and the written word never asked for that and the Holy Spirit does not carry it anywhere.

Those two things use the same hour and the same part of a person, and one of them puts a name down and the other one carries it about all day. You have not stopped doing something. You have swapped one activity for a heavier one without noticing.