Somebody Was Praying And Never Said

You are at the back of a church hall with a paper cup of tea, at the funeral of a woman you barely knew.

She was the one in the second row with the enormous handbag. She never taught anything, never sang, never once stood up front. She asked after your mother in the car park years ago, and you remember being faintly surprised that she knew your mother had been ill at all.

Her daughter is working the room with a plate of sandwiches nobody is eating. When she gets to you she stops. She says your name, first and last, the way people do when they are checking something against a list in their head.

Then she says, you're the one from the book.

And you say, sorry?

She puts the plate down on the radiator cover. She tells you her mother was up at five every morning of her adult life, and that there was a school exercise book, and that there were names in it, written in pencil, prayed in the order they were written. Some of them crossed through, which meant answered. Some with a date beside them. Nineteen names, and yours had been in there since a year she cannot exactly place.

You say, she never told me.

The daughter says, no. She never told anybody. She said if you tell them, they thank you.

And then she picks the plate back up and moves on down the room, because there are forty people here and she has a job to do, and you are left standing by a radiator holding a paper cup and doing arithmetic that will not come out.

Because you know what was happening in your life in those years. You know exactly what you were doing at five in the morning and it was not this.

And you have a story about that time. You have told it from a platform. It has a shape, and a turning point, and a night when you finally decided, and the shape of it is you.

A woman with a big handbag and a pencil has just walked straight through the middle of it.

The verse that puts somebody else in the room

There is a line in James that gets quoted for the healing and skipped for the grammar.

Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.James 5:16

Pray one for another. Not pray for yourself with more conviction. The whole mechanism in that sentence runs between two people, and only one of them is on their knees. Availeth much is an accounting word: it means the thing works, it lands, it produces something on the other end. And the person on the other end of it may well be asleep.

You were prayed for before you had a word for what was wrong with you. James 5:16 says that kind of praying avails and produces, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carried it out of a cold kitchen at five in the morning and into a life that had not asked for the help.

Now look at what that does to the story you tell.

You have a version of your own turnaround with yourself standing at the middle of it, and it is not exactly a lie. It is a partial transcript. Ephesians 2:8 says the whole thing arrived as a gift and not out of anything you produced, and His Spirit has been quietly correcting the credits ever since, gently, without ever once humiliating you about it.

This is the category of thing this whole site is built on, and the theology of it sits entirely in the grammar. He reached. The reaching came from outside. There is a subject and there is an object in that sentence, and for years the two of them have been the wrong way round in the telling.

You were reached at five in the morning by a woman who is now in the ground, and neither of you did the reaching. Isaiah 65:24 has God answering before the calling is even finished, and the Spirit of God was moving through a pencil and an exercise book while you were still asleep and still convinced that you were on your own.

So put down both of the explanations you have been alternating between all these years. It was not luck. A woman got up at five. It was not strength either, and this is the part that costs something to hear, because strength is the version you have been living on.

You are not the reason the thing turned. Psalm 3:8 says salvation belongs to the Lord, and the word never divides it into shares or hands anybody a percentage, and the Holy Spirit is not standing behind you waiting to give you back a portion of the credit to keep you comfortable.

And no shame comes with that. Nobody is being made a fool of here. A person who tells the story of their rescue and leaves out the rescuer is not a liar, they are a survivor with an incomplete file, and today a page of it came back.