The One Who Always Prays

It is always her.

Somebody is leaving and there is a card and a cake and then a small pause, and eleven faces turn about four degrees in her direction, and she prays.

Somebody's mother is going in on Thursday, and there is a message at ten past eleven at night that starts with sorry to bother you. She prays.

The women's thing on the second Wednesday, the thing at the school, the two funerals last year, the man from the flats who is not part of anything and rang the church number and got put through to her. She prays. She is good at it. It is not a performance and she has never once resented it, and if you asked her she would say it is the thing she was made for, and she would mean it.

On a Tuesday in April she sits down at her own kitchen table at twenty past nine with the house empty and a letter in front of her about her own situation, which is hers and is bad and is nobody else's business, and she puts her hands flat on the table to pray.

Nothing.

Not a dry patch. An absence with a shape to it, like a room where the furniture has gone.

She sits there for a while and she tries the thing she tells other people to do, which is to start with thank You, and it goes about six words and stops. Then she tries her own name in the third person, the way she prays for everybody else, and it is worse, it is like listening to yourself on a recording.

And then, because she is honest, she says the thing out loud in an empty kitchen: I do not have anybody who does this for me.

Which is not true, and she knows it is not true, and it is also completely true in the way that matters, because in eleven years nobody has ever asked her if she needs praying for, and she has never once said so, and the two of those things have been holding each other up for a decade.

Moses could not keep his own arms up

Come and sit down, because there is a picture in Exodus that is about you and almost nobody reads it as being about you.

There is a battle going on down in the valley, and Moses is up on the hill with the rod of God in his hand, and while his hands are up the battle goes one way and while they come down it goes the other. That is the famous part. Here is the part that matters this evening.

But Moses' hands were heavy; and they took a stone, and put it under him, and he sat thereon; and Aaron and Hur stayed up his hands, the one on the one side, and the other on the other side.Exodus 17:12

Read what happens to the great intercessor. His hands get heavy. Not his faith. His arms.

And nobody in that chapter treats it as a scandal. Nobody suggests he should have trained harder. They get him a stone to sit on and they stand either side of him and they hold his arms up for him until the sun goes down, and the Bible records their names.

Hear this, sitting at that table. You are not the exception to that verse. The written word says the man who carried a whole nation could not hold his own arms up by the afternoon, and the same Holy Spirit who was working through those raised hands was working just as much through the two men holding them, so needing somebody either side of you is not the failure of your calling. It is the shape the work has always had.

Now let us name the thing that has been building for eleven years, because you said it out loud in the kitchen and it deserves an honest answer.

You have become a person other people receive from and never give to, and that did not happen because they are careless. It happened because you are competent, and competence is the most efficient way in the world to become invisible. Nobody asks the woman with the urn whether she wants a cup of tea.

That is not your fault and it is not entirely theirs. But it is a real thing and it has a real cost, and tonight the cost has arrived in the shape of an empty kitchen and a letter. The written word never once asked the intercessor to go unheld, and the Holy Spirit is not the one who taught you to stay quiet about it.

Hear this too. You are not running dry because something has gone wrong between you and God. Scripture puts a stone under Moses without one word of rebuke, and the Spirit who has been praying through you at every one of those tables is the same Spirit who is in the room right now while you have nothing, and He has not changed His opinion of you between the leaving do and Tuesday.

And here is the part that will cost you something, so I am going to say it plainly.

You are going to have to ask.

Not hint. Not mention it in passing so that a sensitive person might pick it up. Ask, out loud, with the words: I need somebody to pray for me, and I would like it to be you, and I would like you to read it because I do not have any words of my own this week.

That last clause is the one that will stick in your throat. Say it anyway. Aaron and Hur did not invent a prayer either. They held up two arms that were already raised, and there are written prayers sitting in books and on cards all over this country waiting to be somebody's two arms.

You have spent eleven years being the one who holds. The written word says the holder gets held, and it says it about the biggest holder in the Old Testament, and the Spirit of God is not going to make an exception of you in order to keep you useful.