The Photographs She Still Sends

The phone goes at twenty past four, and it is a photograph of a sky.

No caption. There rarely is one. A sky over somewhere her mother has never been, orange going to gray at the edge, and a bit of a roof in the corner. Her mother looks at it for a long time, the way you would look at a letter.

She saves it. She saves all of them. There is a folder on that phone with four years of skies and pavements and one blurred dog in it, and every single one arrived without a word attached.

They talk. That is the thing people get wrong when she tries to explain it. They ring each other. They talk about the car and the weather and whether she has been sleeping. It is warm and it is real and it is not nothing.

It is just that there is a door in the middle of the house now, and both of them walk round it. Her daughter used to sing in the back of the car with her eyes shut. Her daughter used to ask questions at bedtime that her mother could not answer. And then somewhere in her twenties she put the whole thing down, quietly, without a row, and neither of them has said the word God to the other since.

Her mother has prayed about it standing at this window. She has prayed about it in the car outside the surgery. She has prayed the tidy prayers with Scripture in them and she has prayed the ones that were mostly just a name, over and over, until it stopped sounding like a word at all.

And on Sunday a woman she likes very much put a hand on her arm and said, gently and kindly and meaning every bit of it: have you thought about fasting for her?

She said she would think about it. She has thought about nothing else. And underneath the kindness, what she heard was that after four years of skies there was still one more thing she had not done, and that the door in the middle of her house might, somehow, be hers to open.

If you are standing at a window with a photograph of somebody else's sky, come and sit down a while.

Nobody is marking how you pray

Let us settle that in the first minute, because otherwise you will read the rest of this braced.

You have not prayed this badly and you are not being kept waiting on a better sentence. That is not a kind thing I am saying to a mother at a window. It is what is written, that the Lord looketh on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and it is the Holy Spirit who has been carrying four years of half sentences into a place your words could never have reached by themselves.

There is a thing that happens to a person who loves somebody across a closed door. The love does not get smaller. It simply has nowhere to put itself, so it turns into work, and prayer stops being a conversation and becomes a shift you clock into. Then somebody kind adds one more task, and you take it, because you would take anything at all.

Where she is standing right now

David asked a question once that he already knew the answer to, which is how you can tell it was not really a question.

Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?Psalm 139:7

He is not describing a hiding place. He is describing the impossibility of one.

Read it again with your daughter in it. There is no sky in that folder on your phone that God is not already standing under. There is no room she has walked into that He arrived at second.

You are not the one who has to go and find her, because He was never once behind her. I did not invent that for your comfort at a window: it is the plain sense of David's own question (Psalm 139:7), and it is His Spirit, not my paragraph, who makes it something you can actually put weight on this afternoon.

So what is fasting, then, if it is not the thing that finally goes and fetches her?

The smaller and better answer

Here is the honest one, and it is much smaller than the thing that was handed to you on Sunday.

Fasting is not a payment. It is not leverage, it is not the missing piece, and it is not a message sent 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 stands at a window at twenty past four, turned toward God with nothing in her hands.

There is no plan on this page. No length, no kind, no schedule, nothing to follow. A plan is precisely what would turn this back into a transaction, and a transaction is the last thing your daughter needs standing between you and God.

Now the part that has to be said plainly rather than tucked away at the bottom. Some people must not go without food at all, and being one of them takes nothing from you. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a difficult relationship with eating, if you are underweight, unwell or simply unsure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything, and let their answer be the answer. You are not held further from God by a medical note. 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 woman whose body cannot do a thing.

And if today is heavier than a page can carry, if you are frightened for yourself or for her, put this down and ring somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if anyone is in danger tonight. That is not a step away from God. That is the sort of help He puts in the world on purpose.