The Years Somebody Was Praying

It was in the back of a notebook in a box of things nobody wanted.

Her aunt kept lists. Shopping, mostly, and appointments, and the names of people whose funerals she had been to, which is its own sort of list and which took the family a while to understand.

And in the back of one of them, in biro, in a hand that had started to go, there is a page with about eleven names on it and a small mark next to each one.

Hers is fourth.

There is a date at the top of the page. She has checked it against her own history four times now, and it is the January of the year she stopped speaking to almost everybody, which was the beginning of a stretch she does not describe in any detail to anyone, and which ran on for a considerable time.

She had assumed, for the whole of that period and for years afterwards, that she was not in anybody's thoughts. She had made herself difficult to think about on purpose. That was the point of it.

Her aunt did not ring during those years. There was one card and it was not about anything.

And it turns out there was a page, in a notebook, with her name on it, fourth from the top, being read out somewhere in a house she has been in perhaps twice.

She has been carrying that around for eleven days now and it has done something to her she cannot name and cannot get to the bottom of, and the closest she has come to a sentence about it is this: I do not know what I am supposed to do with it.

Her aunt died in the spring.

He labored for people who were not in the room

Sit down with the notebook shut for a minute, because there is a man named at the end of a letter whose entire recorded ministry is what your aunt was doing at that page.

Epaphras, who is one of you, a servant of Christ, saluteth you, always labouring fervently for you in prayers, that ye may stand perfect and complete in all the will of God.Colossians 4:12

Always laboring fervently for you in prayers.

He is not with them. That is the whole situation: he is somewhere else entirely, and the people he is laboring for are a church he cannot see, going about their week without any idea that a man is working at their names in another city.

And notice the word. Laboring. It is a word about effort, and it is used of a thing nobody in Colossae could see, hear, or thank him for.

Hear this at the table. You were not unattended, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture names a man laboring in prayer for people who were not in the room, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carried what an old woman said over a page in a house you have been in twice, into years you had made yourself difficult to reach in.

Now let me take the question you have been carrying for eleven days and turn it round, because it is asking the wrong thing.

What am I supposed to do with it.

That question assumes you have received an invoice. It assumes something was extended to you and there is now a corresponding movement required from you, and that until you make it you are in an awkward position. Nothing written in Scripture works that way, and the Holy Spirit does not send bills.

Look at Epaphras again. There is no instruction anywhere in that letter for the Colossians to do anything about him. Paul tells them what he has been doing and that is the end of it. Nobody is told to write back, to be worthy of it, or to make it count.

They are simply told: somebody has been laboring for you.

Hear this too, and let it stop the eleven days. You do not owe her anything, and Scripture is what says so. What is written reports the laboring as news and never as a debt, and the Spirit of God does not run an account in which a person becomes liable for having been prayed for.

And now the years themselves, because that is where this is actually going to land.

You have carried a version of those years in which you were alone in them. Not lonely; you would say you chose it. Alone in the sense of unattended, out of anybody's sight, going through something in a room with nobody standing outside the door. The written word describes no such room, and the Holy Spirit was never absent from that one.

That version is not true. It has never been true.

There was a page, and a Wednesday, and an old woman's finger going down eleven names, and yours fourth, in the exact January when you stopped answering.

Nothing about that year has changed. What has changed is what was in the room, and it turns out something was.