Nobody Told Me I Was Allowed

Three in the morning, and the chapel at the end of the corridor is the only room in that building with a door she can shut.

Her mother is two floors up and stable, which is a word she has learned to distrust, and she has been awake since Thursday in the useful way where you can still make decisions and the ordinary way of being a person has gone.

She has been praying for eleven hours. She wants that understood. She is not a woman who does not pray.

She was raised in a house where prayer came up hot, out of the floor, and where a woman would pray until something moved and everybody knew when it had. She has seen it. She has done it. She has stood in a room where the praying went on until the sun came up and she would not trade one hour of that for anything on this earth, and they were right about the fire.

But it is three in the morning and there is nothing coming up out of the floor tonight, and she has been going round the same six sentences for so long that they have stopped being sentences.

There is a drawer in the little table at the front. She opens it because she is at the end of herself and people who are at the end of themselves open drawers.

Inside there is a small blue book with soft covers and a ribbon in it, and a folded card, and somebody's reading glasses.

She opens the book at the ribbon and reads seven lines of a printed prayer for those who watch by the sick.

And she has to sit down.

It is not that it was beautiful. It is that somebody had thought about her exact situation, at some point, in a room she will never see, and had written down the sentence she had been unable to build for eleven hours, and she read it and it was the truth and it was already finished before she got there.

Then she closes the book and puts it back in the drawer and feels something she can only call disloyal.

Because in the house she comes from, that little blue book is what people use when they cannot pray.

He handed them a text and He was not lowering the standard

Come here, because I want to put one sentence next to that drawer, and I want you to notice who said it.

Not a committee. Not a tradition. Him.

After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name.Matthew 6:9

Say this. Those are His words about words.

The men He said that to had watched Him pray all night on a mountain. They had seen fire. They were not lacking passion and they did not ask for a technique. They asked for help, and the Son of God, who could have given them anything, gave them a text to say.

So hear me in that chapel at three in the morning, because this is not my opinion and it is not a soft word to make you feel better. You are not disloyal for reading seven printed lines. The written word records the Lord Jesus handing His own friends a set of words to use, and the same Holy Spirit who fell on the room where you were raised is the one who put that blue book in that drawer and had you open it at the ribbon.

Now let us take the fire and the book and put them side by side, because you have been told, without anybody ever quite saying it, that you must choose.

The fire is real. Everything you saw in that house was real. A woman praying until something moves is doing what Scripture plainly does, the Holy Spirit was in every hour of it, heaven has never once been embarrassed by volume, and I will not let anybody tell you that the room you were raised in was doing it wrong. It was not.

And the book is real too. And they are not in competition, because they were never doing the same job.

The fire is what you bring when you have something to bring. The book is what is put in your hand at three in the morning on the fourth night without sleep, when you have nothing, and the difference between those two moments is not the difference between a strong believer and a weak one. It is the difference between Tuesday and Thursday in the same faithful life, and the written word gives the Spirit to both of them without preference.

Elijah called down fire and then, a day later, lay under a tree and asked to die, and God did not lecture him. God sent food and sleep and an angel who touched him twice.

Hear this plainly. You have not slipped down a grade tonight. The written word shows the Lord giving words to the ones He loved most, and His Spirit is the one carrying every syllable you read off that page, so what happened in that chapel was not the failure of your prayer life, it was your Father getting a sentence to you by the fastest route available at three in the morning.

And notice how He got it to you.

Somebody wrote that prayer, years ago, for people they would never meet, in a situation they could only imagine. Somebody printed it. Somebody put a copy in a drawer in a hospital chapel and somebody else replaced it when it wore out. That is a chain of quiet obedience running for decades toward a woman who would open a drawer at three in the morning on the worst night of her life.

That is not a substitute for the Spirit moving. That is the Spirit moving, arranged years in advance, and it took a lot more faith to write it than it took to read it.