The One Prayer You Still Know By Heart

Two in the morning on the fire escape, and the city is doing its low permanent noise, and he is out there because the flat is too small to be awake in.

He is twenty nine. He left all of it at nineteen, and left is the wrong word, because leaving suggests a door and an occasion. What happened was that he stopped going, and then stopped thinking about not going, and then ten years went by like a train through a station.

He does not miss it. He wants that on the record. He misses about four minutes of it, and the four minutes are not the sermon.

Tonight is bad for reasons that are ordinary and will not fit on a form, and at some point he catches himself doing something with his hands and realizes he is holding the rail the way you hold a rail when you are about to say something.

And it arrives.

Not a thought about it. The whole thing, complete, in order, with the rhythm his mother put on it: the little bedtime prayer, the one with the four lines and the bit at the end about the morning. He has not said it since he was maybe eleven. He could not have told you a single word of it an hour ago. It is simply there, whole, the way a phone number from a childhood house is there.

He says the first line out loud, on a fire escape, at two in the morning, in a voice that surprises him.

And he stops immediately, because of what he hears in his own mouth.

He hears a fraud. He hears a man who has not been in a church in ten years using a child's prayer like a key he did not return, and there is a hot feeling in his chest that he correctly identifies as shame, and he says out loud to nobody: I have no right to that.

Then he sits down on the metal step, in the noise, and does not say the other three lines.

The word that went out does not come back empty

Here is what I want you to do with that shame. I want you to weigh it against something written, because shame always sounds like the truth and it is very rarely the whole of it.

So shall My word be that goes out of My mouth: it shall not return to Me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.Isaiah 55:11

Read the middle of that again. It shall not return empty.

That is not a poem about optimism. That is God telling you what happens to His own words after they leave the room. They do not evaporate. They do not go stale in the dark. They go somewhere and they wait, and they come back carrying whatever they were sent for.

So look at what happened on your fire escape at two in the morning. Four lines that a woman said over a boy nearly twenty years ago came back up whole, in order, with her rhythm still on them, on the worst night in a bad month, in a man who was not looking for them.

You did not retrieve that. You are not capable of retrieving that, and you know it, because you could not have written down one word of it before it came. That was the word going out and not returning empty, and the Holy Spirit is the one who kept it, and He kept it in you for ten years while you were not thinking about Him at all.

Now the right you say you do not have. Let us look at it straight, because that is the part standing between you and the other three lines.

You are working from a rule that says access follows attendance. Turn up, and you may use the words; stay away, and the words are somebody else's property now. It is a clean rule and a person can feel almost honorable enforcing it against himself. It is not written anywhere in Scripture, and the Spirit who kept those four lines in you plainly never heard of it.

It is not in the Book anywhere. What is in the Book is a father watching a road, and a son on that road rehearsing a speech about no longer being worthy to be called a son, and the father cutting the speech off before the end of it, because the speech was the last thing the boy had brought home from the far country and it was the one thing his father would not accept.

You have been standing at the top of your own road for ten years, working on the speech.

Hear this, and let it land where the shame is sitting. You are not holding a key you did not return. The written word says His word accomplishes what He sent it for, so the prayer that came back tonight came back because He sent it, and the Spirit who kept it in you is the one who brought it up at two in the morning. That is not you taking something. That is Him handing it over.

And one more thing about those four lines, because you have been treating them as childish and they are not.

They are the church's oldest strategy, running exactly as designed. Put simple sentences into a child so that the sentences are already in the man, ready for a night when he has nothing of his own and no words left to make. That is what your mother was doing over the covers. She was not filling the time. She was building a shelf near the floor of you, and the Spirit of God kept every board of it dry for ten years.

The four lines are not a relic of who you were. They are what was left in place for who you are now, because the written word says His word accomplishes the thing it was sent for, and the Spirit is the one who sent it up tonight.