The Sunday She Sat Down

The hall is empty and it smells of floor polish and cold radiators. Ten past eight on a Sunday morning, an hour and a half before anybody, and the light is coming down through the high windows in long slants with the dust turning over in them.

Verna has the key. She has had the key for eleven years.

She is the one they send for. That is not a boast, it is a fact about that building: when somebody goes down in the second half of the service, when a young mother is crying in the corridor, when a man who has not spoken in six weeks finally says the thing, somebody goes and finds Verna. She comes and she puts a hand on a shoulder and she opens her mouth and words come, and they are the right ones, and nobody has ever known how she does it.

This morning she let herself in early on purpose.

She walked up the middle of the empty rows to the front, the way she has hundreds of times, and she stood where she always stands. The hymn board still had last week's numbers on it. A stack of programs sat on the corner of the table, squared off by somebody with a tidy mind.

She opened her mouth.

Nothing came. Not a dry patch, not a struggle for the right phrasing. Nothing at all. She stood there in the slanted light with the dust going round and there was not one sentence anywhere in her.

She tried the old ones. The ones you can say when you are asleep. They came out of her mouth and went straight down onto the floor like something dropped, and she stopped in the middle of the second one.

And then Verna, who has prayed over hundreds of people in that room, turned around and walked back down the middle aisle and sat down in the back row, on the end, in a chair she has never once sat in.

She did not cry. She sat with her hands in her lap and her coat still on and she looked at the front of a hall she knows better than her own kitchen, and she said nothing at all for forty minutes.

When the first car pulled into the lot she got up, put the urn on, and was standing at the door with her face on when they came in.

You know that chair. You have been the one they send for, or the one who always has something, or just the one who copes, and this week your mouth has been empty and you have said nothing to anybody about it, because who exactly would you say it to.

The Morning Nothing Comes

Let me say the first thing carefully, because if I get it wrong here you will not believe the rest.

This article is not going to hand you back to the work. Nobody is here to top you up so you can go and pour again. I am not interested in your recovery time and neither is God, and if you are braced for the paragraph where the rest turns out to be maintenance, you can let that go now, because it is not coming.

You are being met today as the one in trouble, and that is the whole of it. Scripture says He heals the broken in heart and binds their wounds, and the Holy Spirit does that work on the ones who usually do it for everybody else, with no invoice attached.

Because here is what happened to you somewhere in those eleven years. You became the one who gives, and slowly, without anybody deciding it, you stopped being someone who receives. Not because you are proud. Because there was no slot for it. The room only had one door and it faced outward.

You have been carried the whole time you were carrying, and God has never split those two into a ledger. The Spirit put that into Isaiah before there was a hall or a hymn board: it is written in Isaiah 46:4 that He carries, and that He will carry, right down to old age and gray hairs.

And now the emptiness itself, because you are frightened of it and I want to take the fear out.

The empty mouth is not a failure of faith. It is not a sign that something has gone wrong between you and God. It is not evidence of unconfessed anything. It is what a body does when it has been giving out for eleven years with nothing coming in. Elijah went a day into a desert and asked to die and God's response was to let him sleep and then feed him twice. There was no correction in it. There was a cake and a jug of water and a hand on the shoulder saying the journey is too much for you.

You were never expected to run on your own supply, and the emptiness is telling the truth about that. He promised rest to the ones carrying too much, and His Spirit is not standing at the front of that hall waiting for you to produce a sentence.

Somebody Else Is Doing The Praying

Now here is the verse, and I want you to hear who is doing the work in it.

Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.Romans 8:26

Read that again slowly. We do not know what to pray for. That is not a warning about beginners. That is Paul saying it about everybody, himself included, as an ordinary condition of being a person.

And the answer is not that we should try harder to find the words. The answer is that Someone else is praying, inside us, in a language that has no words in it at all.

Groanings that cannot be uttered. That is not a sentence. That is what came out of you at the front of that hall this morning, and you thought it was nothing.

You have been prayed for this morning, in a room where you thought nothing was happening. That is not my reassurance. Romans 8:26 says it outright, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the praying, which is the entire point of the verse.

Do you understand what that means for the woman on the end of the back row? She thought she had failed to pray. She was in fact sitting inside intercession that was already going on and did not require her participation.

You are not the one holding this up, and you never were. It is written in that same chapter that Christ Himself is at the right hand of God making intercession, and the Spirit does the same work from the inside, so the praying over your life is being carried by two Persons and neither of them is you.

And I will say the other half again because you will try to sneak it back in. This is not a refueling. There is no arrangement here where you receive in order to give. Mercy toward you is not an investment God is making in your future output. He is not that kind of God and you are not that kind of asset. You are a daughter in a chair.