The Name On A List In Another Country

The case number is written on the back of a receipt, and the receipt lives in his wallet, and the wallet has been through two phones and one coat.

He knows the number by heart. He types it anyway, because typing it feels more careful than remembering it, and then he waits for the page, and the page says what the page has said for a long time now. Under review. Two words with no edges on them at all.

His brother is on the other side of that page. His brother, who taught him how to drive and who has a laugh you can hear from the street, sitting in a flat in a city this man has not stood in for years, waiting on a decision that has been coming for so long that the word coming has stopped meaning anything.

They talk every week. Always about small things. About the weather there and the weather here, about somebody's knee, about a football result. The two of them have built an entire relationship out of small things because the large thing cannot be discussed without one of them going quiet.

He has prayed about it. In the car. On the stairs at work. At the table after everybody had gone to bed, out loud, in the language he prays in when nobody is listening, which is not the language he works in. He has prayed the long, correct prayers and he has prayed the short ones that were mostly just a name.

And at a wedding last month an uncle he loves, a man who has carried this family for years, took his hand and said: my son, have you fasted over this?

He said he would. He has thought about almost nothing else. And underneath a sentence that came out of pure love, what he heard was that after all these years there was still one thing he had not done, and that a decision in an office in another country might somehow be waiting on him.

If your wallet has a case number in it, come and sit under the vine a while.

Nobody is marking the way you pray

Let us settle it before anything else, or the whole of this page will land on a shoulder that is already up.

You have not prayed this badly, and you are not being kept waiting while heaven listens for a better sentence. That is not a courtesy offered to a tired man at a table. It is written that the Lord looketh on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and the Holy Spirit has been carrying every one of those late night prayers, in whichever language they came out in, into a place your grammar was never going to reach.

Something happens to a man who loves somebody he cannot get to. The love does not shrink. It has nowhere to put itself, so it becomes administration: numbers, dates, forms, a receipt in a wallet. Prayer stops being a conversation with God and turns into another item being chased. And then an uncle who loves you adds one more item to a list you did not know you were keeping.

The one who does not close the office

There is a line in the Psalms of Ascent, sung by people on a long road, and it is about a God who keeps different hours than an office does.

Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.Psalm 121:4

The singers were traveling. They had reason to worry about the night, and about what happens to a person while nobody is watching.

So the psalm does not tell them the road is short. It tells them who is awake. That is a different kind of comfort, and it is a sturdier one, because it does not depend on the length of anything.

You are being kept, tonight, by One who is not asleep over this. I am not saying that to soften a hard week: it is what the psalm states plainly (Psalm 121:4), and it is His Spirit, not my sentence, that makes it something you can put your weight on at a kitchen table at one in the morning.

So what is fasting, then, if it is not the thing that finally moves a decision?

What it actually is, which is smaller

Fasting is not a payment. It is not leverage, it is not the piece that has been missing, and it is not information carried up to a God who had not been told. It is the body brought into a prayer that was already going up. It is the whole of a person, including the part that gets hungry and tired and refreshes a page at one in the morning, turning toward God with open and empty hands.

There is no plan on this page. No length, no kind, no schedule, nothing to build up to and nothing to complete. A plan is exactly what would turn this back into a bargain, and a bargain is the last thing this family needs standing between it and God.

Now a thing that is said here in the open, not in small print at the bottom. Some people must not go without food at all, and being one of them takes nothing away from you. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with eating, if you are underweight or unwell or simply unsure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything, and let their answer be the answer. You are not held one step further from God by a doctor's advice. Scripture says the Lord is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his works (Psalm 145:9), and the Holy Spirit has never once come in a smaller measure to a household because of somebody's body.

And if tonight is heavier than a page can carry, if you are frightened for yourself or for him, put this down and telephone somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger. That is not a road around God. That is help He has put in the world on purpose.