I Just Say Her Name

Stew used to pray properly and now he says one word.

Two years ago he had a way of doing it. He is that sort of man: he had a page in a notebook with the consultants' names on it and the dates of the scans, and he prayed through it in order, specifically, out loud in the car on the way in, and he would have told you at the time that specific prayer is real prayer and vague prayer is laziness.

He is not wrong about that. He would still say it. He just cannot do it any more.

Somewhere in the second year it wore down. It went from the page, to a few sentences, to one sentence, to a habit of starting something in the car and not finishing it, to this: he pulls into the multi story, and he turns the engine off, and he sits with his hands on the wheel and says, out loud, "Deb."

That is it. That is the whole prayer. Her name, once, sometimes twice, and then he gets out and takes the ticket and goes up.

He has not told anybody. He would find it hard to explain and he thinks it would worry people, and there is a version of Stew in most of their heads that he does not want to disturb.

Rich found out by accident in the summer. They were fitting a gate at Rich's mother's and it came up sideways, the way real things do, over a bag of postcrete.

Rich said, "How are you praying about it?"

He meant it kindly and he meant it as a normal question.

And Stew said, "I just say her name."

There was a pause.

And Rich said, "That is a prayer."

And Stew said, "It does not feel like one."

Now. Wherever you are with yours.

It might be an illness. It might be a child, or a marriage, or a court date, or a thing that has been going on so long that you cannot remember what you used to ask for.

And your praying has worn down. You know the exact wording you used to use and you cannot get to it any more, and what is left is short and thin and does not sound like the prayers of a person who believes anything.

The psalm with no answer in it

There is a psalm that begins with a sentence most people would edit out of a prayer book, and God did not edit it out of His.

My God, my God, why have You forsaken me? Far from my deliverance are the words of my groaning. O my God, I cry by day, but You do not answer; and by night, but I have no rest.Psalm 22:1 to 2

I cry by day, but You do not answer. That is in the Bible. Said to God, about God, and kept.

And now hold the other fact beside it, because the two of them together are the whole message.

That is the psalm Jesus prayed out loud from the cross.

Not a psalm about praise. Not a psalm of confident trust. He reached, in the worst hour there has ever been, for the one that opens on unanswered prayer, and He said the first line of it out loud where people could hear Him.

So hear this said over you, in the multi story with your hands on the wheel. You are praying a prayer that Christ Himself prayed, and the thinness of it is not a measure of your faith. That is written into the Gospel and into the psalm behind it, and it is the Holy Spirit who is described as interceding for us with groanings too deep for words, which is exactly the sound your praying has worn down to.

Now let me say what this message will not do to you.

It will not tell you why.

It will not suggest that God arranged this to teach you something, or that Deb's second year has a purpose you are failing to identify, or that you would be feeling differently if your praying had been better in the first year. Those sentences get handed to people in your position constantly and they are cruelty dressed as comfort, and this article refuses them.

What I can tell you is a single thing, and it is enough to stand on.

Hidden is not gone.

At the cross, every visible fact said God had left. The sky was wrong. The man was dying. There was no answer to the cry, and Scripture does not pretend there was one. And that was the precise moment when God was doing the most for the human race that He has ever done.

Which means the absence of any evidence is not evidence. Not on that Friday, and not in that car park.

You are held right now by somebody you cannot detect, and the fact that you cannot detect Him is not a report on whether He is there. That is written, and the Spirit of God is the one who holds a person underneath their own reading of the situation, and He does that whether or not it registers.

And here is one more thing, about your one word.

You are still going in.

Two years, and you still park, and you still take the ticket, and you still go up. A man who has stopped believing does not do that. The praying wore down and the going did not, and in Scripture that is not a lesser thing, it is the same thing with different clothes on.

Rich was right. Her name is a prayer. It is her name said to Somebody, which is the entire content of most of what David ever wrote, and God has never once required more words from a tired man.

There was a man five hundred years ago who wrote that when he could not pray he would say the name of Christ and nothing else, and that on some days that was the whole of his devotion, and that he had come to think it was worth more than his better years.