You Have Run Out Of Ways To Say It

Ten to six in the morning, and the kettle is on because the kettle is always on, and she is at the table in the half dark with her hands round a mug she is not drinking.

His name is on a sticky note on the inside of the cupboard door. Not because she would forget it. Because two years ago she started putting it somewhere she would see it every single morning, and the note has gone soft at the corners from the door swinging shut on it, and she has never once thought about taking it down.

She has prayed about him standing up and sitting down. She has prayed in the car. She has prayed the good prayers, the ones with Scripture in, and she has prayed the ones that were mostly just his name over and over until it stopped sounding like a word.

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

She said she would think about it. She meant it. She went home and stood in her own kitchen and something in her chest went very tired, because she has been at this for two years, and what she heard, underneath the kindness, was that there was one more thing she had not done yet.

That is the sentence I want to get to before anything else happens on this page.

If you are the one at the table this morning with a soft cornered sticky note and a mug going cold, come and sit down with me for a bit.

Nobody is grading the way this got prayed

Let us settle it in the first minute, because if we do not you will read the rest of this with your shoulders up.

You have not prayed wrongly, and you were never once being marked on it. Not too little, not with too small a faith, not in the wrong words, and not without enough of something God was waiting to see: it is written that the Lord looketh on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and the Holy Spirit has been carrying two years of worn out sentences into a place your wording could not have reached. Nothing on this page is going to hand you a technique you have not tried, and nothing on this page is going to suggest that the silence in your house is a report card on you.

Hear this while the kettle clicks off. You are not the reason he has not come home, and you are not what is holding this up. I am not saying that to be kind to you. I am saying it because it is what is written: the Lord your God is the one who goes before you, and He himself fights for you (Deuteronomy 1:30), and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence that makes that land in the actual kitchen you are standing in.

There is a thing that happens to people who love somebody who is not speaking to them. The love goes on being enormous and it has nowhere to put itself, so it turns into work. Prayer becomes a shift you clock into. And then somebody, kindly, adds a task.

The one Jesus told, and who He told it about

Jesus told a story about a woman who kept going back, and Luke tells you the reason for the story before he tells you the story, which he almost never does.

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

Read what it was for. Not so that she would get better at asking. So that she would not faint.

He was not teaching persistence as a lever. He was looking straight at people who were tired of asking and telling them that the tiredness was the danger, not the asking. And the whole point of the story is the difference between the judge and the Father: the judge gives in because he is worn down, and God is nothing like him, which is exactly why you do not have to wear anybody down.

You are already heard. Not scheduled to be heard when the count is high enough. Heard. That is not my encouragement to you, it is His own word, that before they call, He will answer (Isaiah 65:24), and His Spirit is the one carrying it into a room where nothing has visibly changed for two years.

So what is fasting, then, if it is not the thing that finally makes God move?

What going without is actually for

Here is the honest answer, and it is smaller and better than the thing that woman handed you in the corridor.

Fasting is not a payment and it is not a lever and it is not the piece that has been missing. It is your body being brought into a prayer you were already praying. It is not information sent to heaven. Heaven had the information. It is you, the whole of you, the part that gets hungry and tired and stands at a cupboard door, turning toward God with nothing in your hands. Scripture calls that presenting your body a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable, your reasonable service (Romans 12:1), and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an ordinary morning the place it actually happens.

That is all. And that is a lot.

Now hear the rest of it, because this matters more than anything else I will say to you today. Some people must not go without food, and being one of them takes nothing away from you at all. If you are pregnant, if you live with diabetes, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with eating, if you are frail or underweight or unwell, or if you simply do not know, then speak to your doctor before you go without anything, and let their answer be the answer. If they say no, that is not a door closing on you. God has never once handed a mother a locked door and called it the way in. The written word says the Lord is good to all, and His tender mercies are over all His works (Psalm 145:9), and the Holy Spirit does not come to a woman in smaller measure because her body cannot do a thing.

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

You have permission to stop trying to be the one who makes this happen. The word for it is right there in Peter, casting all your care upon him, for he careth for you (1 Peter 5:7), and the Spirit is the one who takes the weight when you actually let go of it rather than merely agreeing that you should.