Prayed For By A Stranger

His sister told him in the kitchen while she was doing something else, which is how the important things get said in that family.

She said: by the way, you are on the list at their church. Since April.

He said, oh. Right. Good. And then he asked her about the car.

Later that evening he sat in his own front room and had a feeling he did not enjoy and could not immediately name, and it took him most of a week to get near it.

The nearest he has got is this. He felt like an item.

Not cared for. Processed. A name typed under a heading on a sheet of A4 that gets folded into thirds and handed out on a Sunday morning in a building four hundred miles away to people who have never met him, who will look at his name for a second and a half and say something general over it and then move to the next one.

He has been through something this year. It is not the sort of thing you put in a sentence and it is not over.

And what he wants, if he is honest, is for the specific people in his life to know it and to be with him in it, and what he has instead is nine strangers with a folded piece of paper, and there is something in that which felt, on Tuesday, close to humiliating.

He has not told his sister any of this. He is not going to.

For them that have not seen my face

Sit down with me a minute, because there is a sentence at the start of a chapter that is doing precisely what those nine strangers are doing, and Paul does not describe it as a formality.

For I would that ye knew what great conflict I have for you, and for them at Laodicea, and for as many as have not seen my face in the flesh.Colossians 2:1

For as many as have not seen my face in the flesh.

He has never met them. There is a whole town on that list, and another town after it, and the phrase he uses for what he is doing about it is great conflict, which is a word about a struggle, about wrestling, about something that costs.

Not a moment of general goodwill. Conflict, for people whose faces he could not pick out of a crowd.

Hear this in your own front room. You are not an item, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture has an apostle in a great conflict for strangers by name, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries what nine people in a hall four hundred miles away say over a folded sheet of paper on a Sunday morning.

Now let me name the thing that actually stung, because it was not the strangers.

What you want is for the people who know you to be in this with you. That is not a failure of gratitude, nothing written in Scripture calls it one, and the Holy Spirit is not offended by it. That is the ordinary and right desire of a man going through something, and it is the thing you have not got, and being handed a substitute makes the absence louder rather than quieter.

That is why Tuesday felt the way it did. Nobody was humiliating you. A gap was being illuminated.

Hear this too, and let it come off. You have not been demoted to charity, and Scripture is what says so. What is written puts strangers under a great conflict for one another as the ordinary practice of the church, and the Spirit of God does not deliver a thinner grace through people who do not know your face.

And now the thing about the second and a half, because that is the picture in your head and it is worth correcting.

You imagine a name read for a second and a half by somebody who has already moved on.

Some of it is like that. That is true and I am not going to pretend the church is better than it is.

But somewhere on the third Sunday, one of those nine put a thumb on your name because something about it caught, and prayed for a man they will never meet for longer than they meant to, and did not tell anybody, and does not remember it now.

You will never know which one and you will never know when. That is the standing condition of every person who has ever been on a list, and it is why the list works.