The Names That Never Get Read

Eleven names, most weeks, and he could tell you ten of them without looking.

Somebody in hospital. Somebody's operation. The family with the thing that everybody knows about and nobody says out loud. A funeral coming up. A young man who has gone off somewhere and whose mother is in the second row.

They are all real. Every one of those names should be on that sheet and he would fight anybody who said otherwise.

What he noticed, in March, was who is not on it.

There is a woman who has come to that building for thirty one years and has never once been on the sheet. Nothing has ever happened to her. She has no crisis, no diagnosis, no family situation that has surfaced, and she does the flowers, and she has never asked anybody for anything in her life.

There is a man in his fifties who comes in at the last minute and goes at the end and speaks to about two people. Eleven years. Never on the sheet.

There are the two teenagers whose parents bring them, who nobody has any reason to worry about, and who are therefore never mentioned by anybody in any context at all.

And once he had seen it he could not unsee it, and he has been counting since March, and it is more than half the room.

He said something about it once, carefully, and somebody said, kindly and reasonably: well, we pray for the ones who need it.

He did not have an answer at the time. He has one now and it took him four months and it is not an argument, it is a question: how would we know?

God forbid that I should sin in ceasing to pray for you

Sit down here a minute, because there is a sentence from Samuel that puts this in language nobody expects, and it is said to a whole nation at once.

The people have just done something disastrous. He has told them so. And then, in the middle of a speech that is not going particularly well for them, he says this.

Moreover as for me, God forbid that I should sin against the Lord in ceasing to pray for you: but I will teach you the good and the right way.1 Samuel 12:23

God forbid that I should sin in ceasing to pray for you.

Two things in that, and both of them land on your March.

First, ceasing is the failure. Not praying badly, not praying without feeling, not failing to produce a result. Stopping.

And second, look at who he is talking about. Not a list of urgent cases. A nation. Everybody. The ones in trouble and the ones who are perfectly fine and the ones nobody has thought about for a decade, all of them, in one sentence.

Hear this in that hall. You are not being scrupulous, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture names the ceasing as the sin and puts a whole people in the frame rather than the emergencies, and the Holy Spirit is the one who showed you the room in March and would not let you unsee it.

Now let me put the kind answer next to that, because the person who said it was not being lazy.

We pray for the ones who need it.

That is a fine sentence and it is doing an important job: it stops a list becoming a directory and it keeps the urgent things urgent. Nobody is doing anything wrong.

And it contains one hidden assumption, which is that need becomes visible. That a person in trouble ends up on a sheet.

The woman who has done the flowers for thirty one years is exactly the person that assumption fails on. So is the man who speaks to two people. So is a teenager who is fine, and so is anybody who was raised not to make a fuss, which in most rooms is about half of them.

Hear this too, and let it be the answer you did not have in March. You were not being fussy, and Scripture is what says so. What is written puts a whole nation under one man's refusal to cease, and the Spirit of God has never once required a visible emergency before a person was worth naming.

And now the thing about the quiet ones, because it is the reason this matters and it is not sentimental.

A person who has never been prayed for by name, out loud, by anybody, in thirty one years, is not neglected in some abstract way. They have simply never been the subject of a sentence, and being the subject of a sentence is one of the things a body does for its own.

You cannot fix that for a whole room. You can put three of them in your own mouth this week.