The Same Prayer Every Year

The carpet at the altar rail is worn shiny in two places and one of them is hers.

Fall revival, third night, and the pianist is on the second verse of the invitation hymn with the sustain pedal down. Somebody put a box of tissues on the rail earlier and it has been moved twice. Down the row a teenage boy is crying the way boys cry, silently and furiously, with his fists on the wood. A deacon in a gray suit has one hand on his back and is not saying anything, which is the right call.

She comes up the aisle the way she has come up the aisle every fall since her daughter was small, and she kneels in the same place, and her knees find the same two dips in the carpet. The rail is cold. The wood smells like lemon and old varnish and forty years of hands.

And she starts the sentence.

She gets four words into it and stops.

Because she has heard it before. She has heard herself say it before, in this building, on this carpet, in this exact spot, with the same piano underneath it. Nineteen falls. The same request, worn as smooth as the carpet, and she can hear that it is smooth. That is the thing that stops her. It has stopped being a cry and started being a recitation, and she can hear the difference, and she does not know how to make her own voice mean it again.

The one thing has not moved. Not an inch. She has brought it here at nineteen altar calls, at two women's retreats, in a hotel bathroom at one in the morning, and in her own car more times than she could count.

She stays where she is because getting up now would look like something. The pianist goes to the third verse. And she kneels there with nothing to say, listening to her own silence, feeling something she would not admit to anybody in this room, which is not doubt exactly. It is embarrassment.

Then it is over, and people are standing, and somebody hugs her, and she goes out to her car.

And you know that altar, even if yours is a chair by a window or the floor of a closet. You know what it is to bring God the same thing so many times that the words have gone smooth in your mouth. You are not looking for a new sentence. You have run out of ways to say the old one like you mean it, and the thing you have been asking about is exactly where it was.

The sentence that went smooth

Let me start with what that smoothness is not, because a woman on a cold rail should not have to carry a wrong diagnosis home.

It is not proof that she stopped caring. Smooth is what a stone gets after nineteen years in a river, and nobody looks at a smooth stone and concludes the river quit. It is not proof that God got tired of the sentence either. He is not a man in an office who has read the file too many times.

And listen to how Jesus set this up, because He set it up for exactly this room.

And he spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint.Luke 18:1

He told the story of the persistent widow so that nobody would lose heart. That is the stated purpose, written right into the first line. Notice He did not say the widow's technique wore the judge down and neither should ours. The judge is the contrast in that parable, not the model, and the Spirit who moved Luke to write down the reason before the story is not hiding a mechanism from anybody in this building.

You are praying, and it is being heard, and the smoothness in your voice has changed nothing about that. Luke 18:1 says the point of the story is that people not lose heart, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps a worn sentence from being wasted breath.

And there is a verse that goes further, and it is the one I want in her car with her on the way home.

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 who is doing the praying in that sentence. Not the woman with the smooth words. The Spirit, underneath her, in a register that has no words in it at all.

You have an intercessor already at work under the sentence you can no longer say well. That is Romans 8:26, written plainly, and the Spirit named there is not waiting on better phrasing from the person on the rail.

There is no key you have been missing

Now let me take something out of her hands, and I want to be blunt about it, because nineteen years is long enough to be handed a lot of bad theories.

There is no key. There is no sin she has not confessed that is jamming the lock. There is no word she has not said in the right order. The thing that has not moved in her is not a demon riding her, it is not a curse laid on her family line, and it is not a punishment. Anybody who hands a woman a diagram of her own inheritance and calls it discernment has given her a new project, not a word from God.

And she does not owe the details to anybody. Not to a small group, not to a prayer chain, not to me. What she brings to God she can bring alone in a car, and it is fully brought.

Here is the ground under all of it, and it is a valley with nothing living in it.

And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord GOD, thou knowest. Again he said unto me, Prophesy upon these bones, and say unto them, O ye dry bones, hear the word of the LORD. Thus saith the Lord GOD unto these bones; Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live.Ezekiel 37:3-5

God does not ask the prophet to repair the bones. He does not ask him to explain how they got dry, or which one is the problem, or what he might have done differently in the years the valley was filling up. He asks him to speak, and then God Himself supplies the breath.

You have been carrying a job that was never assigned to you, and the breath was always His to send. Ezekiel 37:5 says I will cause breath to enter, first person, God speaking, and it is the Spirit of God who does the entering while the prophet only opens his mouth.

When the dry place is costing somebody

If the thing you keep bringing to that rail is wearing you down in your body, or getting out of you and landing on the people in your house, then hear this next part as plain as I can make it.

Bringing another person into this is no step around what God is doing; He has always worked through people who have names and phone numbers. A doctor, because a body that is not sleeping bends everything a soul does, and most sermons never once mention it. A counselor, who will still be on this same subject next month and the month after that, and who sees what nobody sees from the inside. One friend with the whole story rather than the edited one, if you choose to tell it. And if the drive home has started carrying the wish that it might be your last one, call or text 988 before you reach the driveway, or a crisis line in your county, and have somebody with you until morning. That is no detour from this subject. On a cold rail at the third night of revival it is the subject.

You were held through every one of those nineteen falls, and you were never once kneeling in an empty building. His word calls Him the God who is near to the brokenhearted, Psalm 34:18, and Helper is the name Jesus laid on His Spirit, a duty He took on Himself rather than a compliment paid to the woman at the rail.