Praying Like It Depends On Me

The side room off the sanctuary smells of carpet shampoo and old coffee. It is twenty past six on a Saturday morning and the light is coming in low and yellow across the folding table, over the tin of butter cookies nobody has touched since Easter.

Charmaine is on her knees with her forehead on the seat of a metal chair.

Her hands are on the frame of it, and if you were in the room you would notice the knuckles, because they are white. That is not devotion. That is grip.

She is praying for a young man. His mother asked the group in March, and Charmaine took the request the way she takes all of them, seriously, and wrote it in the book. But something happened between March and now that she could not point to on a calendar.

It started with fifteen minutes. Then it was thirty, because thirty felt more like it meant something. Then she noticed, and this is the part that has hold of her, that the week she gave it forty minutes there was good news, and the week she had the flu and gave it four there was not. She knows how that sounds. She has told herself twice this month that it does not work like that and she does not believe herself, because she has started timing it.

There is a notebook on the folding table with the dates down the left side and the minutes down the right. She has never shown it to anybody. She would not know how to explain it without sounding like a woman who has lost her footing, and she has not lost her footing, she is simply the only one in that whole building who has not put this down.

She fasted two days last week. She got up at four the day before yesterday. And this morning, kneeling on a carpet with her forehead against a cold chair, she said his name and then heard her own voice, and her voice sounded like a woman hauling on a rope.

She stopped. She stayed down there in the yellow light with her eyes shut and did not say anything else for a while.

There is a sentence sitting underneath all this that she has never once said out loud, and it is this: if I let go, he goes under.

You know that sentence. It might not be a young man and it might not be a notebook. It might be a sister, a grown child, a friend who calls at the wrong hours. But you have felt the rope in your hands and you have felt what happens in your chest when you think about setting it down, and somewhere along the way the kindness turned into arithmetic and you did not notice the day it changed.

The Rope Was Never In Your Hands

I want to start where it hurts, because there is no point starting anywhere else.

You have been carrying something that was never issued to you. Not the praying. The praying is good and God has heard every syllable of it. What was never issued to you is the outcome. And the two got welded together so quietly that you cannot now remember praying without them being one thing.

You are holding a request, not a verdict, and those have never been the same object. No sentence of mine settles that. Scripture does, and His Spirit does: it is written in 2 Corinthians 12:9 that His grace is sufficient, and sufficient is a word about Him.

And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness.2 Corinthians 12:9

Read who is speaking there and to whom. That is God answering a man who had asked three times for something to be taken away and had not got it. Not a man who prayed badly. Not a man short of anything. Paul. And the answer he got was not more minutes and it was not a technique. The answer was a word about God's own supply, handed to a man at the exact end of his own.

You have been praying inside a sufficiency that was never dependent on your stamina. The Spirit put that word into Paul before anybody wrote it down, and the word says the strength is made perfect precisely where a person runs out.

Now let me say the harder half, gently, because you are tired.

The arithmetic is not faith. It looks like faith from outside and it feels like faith from inside, and it is actually fear wearing the clothes of diligence. The week of forty minutes and the week of four are not evidence of anything, and the notebook is not a record of your reliability. It is a record of a woman trying to find the lever.

There is no lever. You were never given a lever, and that is mercy toward you and not a demotion. Scripture says salvation belongs to the Lord, and the Holy Spirit has never once made a person's rescue turn on how well somebody else held on.

Sufficient Is Already A Finished Word

Here is where this stops being a relief and starts being a load off.

If the outcome of that young man's life sits on the quality of your praying, then every hour you sleep is a risk, every day you are ill is a gap in the wall, and every ordinary Tuesday when your mind wanders at minute eleven is a small betrayal. That is not a life. And more to the point, it is not the arrangement God made.

You are being held up by the same God you have been trying to hold somebody else up for. He promised that He would never leave, and His Spirit has been on that young man's road on every one of the mornings you overslept.

Which frees the mercy to be what mercy actually is. Mercy is an act toward a need. It is not an outcome you produce. The Samaritan bandaged a man and paid for a room and left, and Scripture never tells us what happened to that man afterward, and the not telling is deliberate. The story is complete without the ending, because the mercy was complete without the ending.

You have been merciful already, and it was finished at the point you gave it. It is written in Galatians 6:9 that we are not to grow weary in doing good, and the same Spirit who keeps a person from growing weary is the one who tells them when to stand up off the carpet.

And there is a thing to say about limits, because you have been treating yours as a moral failure. Limits are not evidence of thin love. They are the ordinary shape of a created person. God made you with an end to you on purpose, and He did not do it grudgingly. The end of you is where the sufficiency starts being about Him, which is where He said He wanted it.

Nobody in heaven is disappointed that you cannot pray for eighteen hours. That expectation came from somewhere else, and it did not come from Him.