The One I Cannot Reach

Nine years is a long time to say the same thing.

She could tell you when it started. Not the year, the day, and what she was wearing, and what was on the radio in the other room while she stood there and made a promise to God that she has kept.

Every day since. Not one missed, or near enough. Nine years of holding one person up.

And she loves that person and she is not going to describe them on a page, and the situation is theirs and not hers to set out.

Here is what has happened to the praying, which is the actual subject.

It has become a piece of work.

She did not intend that. It came in gradually and it came in through good doors: a book, a woman she respects, a talk about how to pray with authority, another about praying in agreement, another about specific words versus general ones. All of it well meant, and some of it true.

And now, nine years in, she has a way of doing it. There is a form. There is a right time in the morning and a wrong one. There are phrases she has to include, and one she has to avoid because a woman told her in about the fourth year that it was a doubting phrase.

And she has more technique than she has ever had, and less peace than she started with.

And on Sunday she sat in a side room after everybody had gone and said something out loud that frightened her a bit: I am not carrying this person to You any more. I am operating something, and it has been nine years, and I am tired.

And you know that exactly, because there is somebody you love and your praying for them has quietly turned into work.

Carrying somebody is not the same as working on it

Let us settle what governs this whole page. Nothing on it is being asked of you, there is no appeal at the bottom, and there is no method in it anywhere.

You are looking at an invitation, and the One being tested inside it is God. Follow the verb in the famous sentence and it lands on Him. He is under examination. He is the one who offered to be found out. It is written, put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts (Malachi 3:10), and the Holy Spirit is what turns a famous sentence into an invitation addressed to you.

Here it is, in its own room:

Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. And thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need.Malachi 3:10

Said to a nation, in one decade, about one building, where the store room had emptied and the families who worked there had gone home hungry. It is a sentence about people eating, and it is spoken in a father's voice about a house that is not working: come and find out whether I am who you have decided I am.

Now the form, and it needs handling gently, because every piece of it arrived through somebody who loved you.

A method is safe. That is why it grows on a person over nine years. If the praying works by operation then something is in your hands, and when the person you love is not in your hands, having anything in them at all is a mercy.

And there is a price, and you named it yourself in the side room. If it works by operation, then nine years of nothing is nine years of your operation, and you have been carrying that in the small hours and calling it faithfulness.

You are dealing with a Father and not a form, and He has never once been operated by anybody's phrasing. Jesus said it in ordinary family language: which of you, if his son asks for a fish, will give him a serpent, or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion (Luke 11:11). Nobody in that sentence has a technique. A child asks badly and a father is not that kind of person. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes a line like that off a page and puts it in a side room after everybody has gone.

Now the phrase you were told to avoid.

No sentence you say can undo the kindness of God, and there is no doubting phrase that cancels a prayer. It is written that if we are faithless He remains faithful, for He cannot deny Himself (2 Timothy 2:13), and a man in the Gospels once said to Jesus, I believe, help my unbelief (Mark 9:24), which is about as doubting as a phrase can get, and the answer he received was not a correction. His Spirit is the one who makes that a door back into ordinary praying rather than an interesting exception.

And now the harder, freeing thing, which is the actual center of this page.

God will not be used as leverage on the person you love, and the reason He will not is the same reason He never forced you. It is written that He stands at the door and knocks (Revelation 3:20), which is astonishing when you consider who made the door. If nine years of correct praying could compel a human will, then somebody could have compelled yours, and you would not be a person.

So nothing here is going to give you a better way to pray them into place. That is the form again in a nicer dress, and you were right to be uneasy about it.

Here is what is yours, and it is not smaller.

You can bless them and hand the distance to God, and both of those are open to you this afternoon. It is written to bless and not curse (Romans 12:14), and that so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all (Romans 12:18). Half of it does not depend on you, and Paul knew that when he wrote it. The Spirit is the one who makes that a limit you can rest inside rather than a failure you have to explain.

And nobody is asking you to want it less.

You are allowed to want this enormously and to stop working on it, and the two are not in competition. It is written that we have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, Abba, Father (Romans 8:15), and notice again that the Spirit produces the cry. Even that is not your technique.

If you find this hard, you are not failing at it. Nine years is a long time to hold somebody, and finding it difficult is not evidence about your faith. It is evidence that you have been faithful for nine years with machinery on your back.