He Stopped Letting Them Pray For It

His friend reached across the low table and said, brother, let me pray with you about it tonight.

And he said thank you, not tonight, and he poured the tea.

That is all that happened. His friend took his hand back without any fuss, and did not push it, and the evening went on and was a good evening, and nobody in that room thought anything of it.

He has been saying that for about two years now.

He did not always. He used to say yes to everybody, and he meant it, and he would sit there with three men's hands on him in a room like this one and something in his chest would come up off the floor while they prayed.

Here is what he learned, and it took him a long time to see the shape of it.

The coming up off the floor lasts about four days.

Four days of a live hope. Four days of checking the phone differently, of noticing the door, of a certain lightness getting into the way he walks across a room. Four days in which he is, quietly and without telling anybody, expecting.

And then there is a fifth day.

He knows exactly what the fifth day is. It is not dramatic. Nothing happens on it. It is simply the day the four days stop working, and everything that came up off the floor goes back down onto it, and it goes down heavier than it was before because it has been lifted.

He has been through the fifth day more times than he can count now, and somewhere in the last two years he did the arithmetic that nobody should have to do, and worked out that the silence is cheaper.

So now he says thank you, not tonight.

His friends think he has made peace with it. One of them said so, admiringly, at a wedding.

If you have started declining the prayer to protect yourself, come and sit down at this table. Nobody here is going to put a hand on your arm.

The psalm that ends in the dark

There is a psalm most people have never heard read out in a service, and the reason is that it does not do what the others do.

Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness.Psalm 88:18

That is the last verse. Not the low point in the middle. The end.

Every other psalm of that kind turns somewhere. There is a yet, or a but as for me, or a nevertheless, and the writer climbs out into the light before the last line.

Psalm 88 does not. It goes down, and it stays down, and the final word of the whole thing is darkness.

And it was kept. Collected, numbered, set to music, handed to the congregation, and never once quietly improved by anybody in three thousand years.

You are inside a page that heaven kept exactly as it was rather than tidying it into a better ending. Psalm 88:18 finishes on darkness with no correction attached anywhere in the psalm, and the Holy Spirit preserved it in the songbook of God's own people, which means a man who cannot manufacture a turn tonight is standing on a page rather than off the edge of one.

Nobody here is going to tell you to hope harder

Let us say the thing this article is not going to do, and let us say it early, because the bracing for it starts on the first line.

Nobody is going to tell you to hope harder.

That is the instruction that has been handed to you, in various kind and gentle wordings, for years, and every single time it has landed as a bill for something you have already spent.

You are not being charged with unbelief, and the sickness in your chest has never been read as a failure of faith. Proverbs 13:12 says hope deferred maketh the heart sick and then simply stops, with no advice, no correction and no remedy attached to that clause, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept it in that order, which means a long wait producing a sick heart is exactly what the word says will happen to a person.

Not what happens to weak people. What happens. It is written as a description of how a human being is made.

The arithmetic you did was honest

Now the four days, because a man should not be alone with that calculation.

You worked out that being lifted costs more than staying down, and then you made a decision on the basis of it, and you have never once said any of that out loud because it sounds, said plainly, like a man giving up. It is not giving up. It is a man who has been through the fifth day too many times protecting the last of something.

You were being careful with a heart that has taken more than most, and carefulness has never once been counted against anybody in this book. Psalm 103:14 says He knoweth our frame, He remembereth that we are dust, and it is written as the reason for His pity rather than as an excuse being made for us, and it is the same Spirit who carries a word at the weight a person can take, which means the God you are declining prayer in front of already knows the arithmetic and is not offended by it.