The Man Nobody Prays For

Twenty two years on one rota or another, and he could tell you where the fuse box is.

He is the person people ring. When somebody's mother goes into hospital, he is on the list of three that gets rung, and often the first one. He has driven people to appointments. He sat with a man in a car for two hours in 2019 and has never told anybody about it, including his wife.

He is fine. That is the ordinary and true state of it and he is not being brave. He has a good marriage and reasonable health and a job that is neither here nor there, and if you asked him he would say, honestly, no complaints.

In April he was in the car park after a meeting and something arrived that has not left.

He could not remember the last time anybody had prayed for him out loud, by name, in front of him.

He went back through it properly, the way you check whether you locked a door. Not a general prayer for the leaders. Not being included in a we. Him, named, out loud, by another human being, with him in the room.

The best he could get to was his wedding.

That was twenty six years ago.

He is not bitter about it. He wants that understood, and it is true, and it is also exactly why nobody has ever done it: he is unmistakably fine, and people pray for the ones who are not.

He has told nobody. He is not going to tell anybody. He has, in fact, spent about four months privately deciding that noticing it at all was a bit self indulgent.

He ever liveth to make intercession

Sit down at the table with your tea, because there is a sentence in Hebrews that answers your April at a level nobody in that hall could have reached.

Wherefore He is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by Him, seeing He ever liveth to make intercession for them.Hebrews 7:25

He ever liveth to make intercession.

Not He interceded once. Not He intercedes when somebody flags it up. Ever liveth, which is a phrase about a continuous state, and to make intercession, which is the same activity Marjorie does on a Thursday and your aunt did with a biro, running permanently, at the right hand of God, on your name.

While you were in the car park in April working out that nobody had said it, somebody was saying it.

Hear this in the hall. You are not unnamed, and the written word is what settles it, not consolation. Scripture has the Son of God permanently occupied in intercession, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brought this to your attention in a car park after four months of you calling it self indulgence.

Now let me name the mechanism, because it is not neglect and it is worth being fair to those people.

You are competent, and you are steady, and you have been both of those things in that building for twenty two years, and competence is the most effective camouflage there is, and nothing in the written word rewards it with invisibility, and the Holy Spirit has seen every year of it.

Nobody has ever wondered how you are, because you have answered the question before it was asked, every single time, for two decades. That is not their failure and it is not your fault. It is what a reliable man produces around himself without meaning to.

Hear this too, and let it stop the four months of dismissal. Noticing it was not self indulgent, and Scripture is what says so. What is written puts Christ Himself in permanent intercession for people, and the Spirit of God does not raise a thing in a man in a car park in order to shame him for having raised it.

And now the part that will cost you more than any of the rest of this, and it is one sentence.

Ask.

Not a general remark. Not I could do with a bit of prayer, which is what a man like you says when he is trying to make it easy for the other person to miss it.

Go to one person, name them, and say: will you pray for me? And then stop talking, and let it be awkward for the two seconds it will be awkward for, and do not explain, because the explaining is where you turn it back into a report on somebody else's situation.

They will say yes. They will very likely do it there and then, badly and warmly, and you will not know where to put your face.

You have been the one who does that for other people for twenty two years. You know exactly how much it is worth, because the written word says it is worth that, and the Holy Spirit has been in every one of those prayers you prayed for somebody else. You have simply never been on the other end of it.