The Prayer You Cannot Say In That Room

The chair is plastic and it is the same chair in every hospital in the world.

Her brother is asleep, or is doing the thing that is not quite sleep, and the machine on his side of the bed makes the small sound it makes, and a trolley goes past outside and stops and goes on.

Four days ago the nurse said, on her way out, in the kindest possible voice: he asked me if you would pray with him.

She has not.

It is not that she does not pray. She has prayed on the stairs, in the corridor, in the car in the multi story with the engine off, and in the queue in the shop downstairs holding a sandwich she did not eat. She has prayed more in eleven days than in the last two years.

But every prayer she has is one of these.

Please do not take him. Please not this. I cannot do the next part on my own, I have never once been the one who knows what to do. If You are going to do it anyway then at least let it be quick, and I do not know how to want that.

You cannot say any of that out loud six inches from a man's face.

So what she does, when he is awake and looking at her and there is a space where it could happen, is squeeze his hand and say something about the tea. And he says something back about the tea. And they are both, she is fairly sure, aware of exactly what is not being said, and the not saying is beginning to sit in the room like a third person.

In her handbag there is a card that came out of a book, with the evening prayer on it. Somebody put it in there in March.

She has read it forty times in the corridor.

She has never once got it out in the room.

Somebody wrote words for people standing exactly there

Sit still a minute, because I want to tell you what that card in your handbag actually is, and it is not a poor substitute for the prayer you cannot say.

He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: He that keepeth thee will not slumber.Psalm 121:3

That is a traveling psalm. People said it going up a road, and they said it out loud, together, and one of the things it does is put the keeping in the right hands in front of everybody listening.

Read it again and notice the direction of the work. He that keepeth thee will not slumber. It is not asking the traveler to hold on. It is telling the traveler who is holding, and it is saying it in a voice loud enough for the whole road to hear.

Now hear this, sitting in that chair. You are not failing him by not saying your own prayer out loud. The written word is what set the pattern of saying the same steady words over people who are frightened, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying every word off that little card, so the prayer you have been reading in the corridor is not the second best version. It is the one designed for the room.

Let me take apart the thing you have been carrying, because it is not what you think it is.

You believe there are two prayers, a true one and a safe one, and that saying the safe one at the bedside would be a performance, and that you have too much integrity for that. Nothing written in Scripture divides prayer that way, and the Holy Spirit has been carrying both of yours since the first night.

But look at what the true one actually is. It is not a doctrine. It is fear, in sentences, and fear is honest and it belongs somewhere, and where it belongs is exactly where you have been putting it: on the stairs, in the car, in the queue with the sandwich. Nothing about that is dishonest. That is a woman handling her terror in front of God and not in front of a sick man, and that is not concealment, it is love with a sense of timing.

And here is what the old words do that yours cannot do tonight.

They say something over him instead of about him. They tell him, out loud, in the room, that the One keeping him does not sleep. That is a sentence he cannot say to himself right now and it is the exact sentence he was asking for when he spoke to the nurse.

He did not ask you to be eloquent. He asked you to pray with him. What he wants is not information about how you feel. He wants to hear something steady said out loud beside his bed, because a room where nothing is said is a room where the worst thing is the only thing present, and he has been lying in that room for eleven days.

Hear this plainly, because it is the sentence that will get the card out of the bag. You are not the one keeping him. You never were, and the written word says so directly, and the Spirit of God who has kept every watch since the world began is not asking a woman in a plastic chair to take over. The keeping is His. Your part is to say so out loud, and there are printed words in your handbag that do exactly that.

And one more thing, because it is the part nobody tells you.

The old words will hold when your voice goes. That is not incidental, it is the reason they were written down, and the Spirit of God is the one who has kept them in print for exactly this. You can get through a printed line with your throat closing in a way you can never get through a sentence you are composing, because a printed line does not require the part of you that has stopped working.

Somebody wrote that card for a woman in a plastic chair. They did not know your name. They knew you existed.