The More Devoted Ones

Wednesday, quarter past seven, eleven people and one radiator that clanks.

The chairs are in a rough ring at the front and there is one stacking chair still against the back wall, and that is the one you take, because the ring means you might have to go next.

They start. And they are good. That is the honest problem. The woman in the blue cardigan prays the way other people talk, warm and unhurried, and she says things about God you have never thought of and clearly believes every one of them. The old man with the flat cap prays four sentences and everybody in the room goes quiet afterwards, and you could not tell anybody why. Somebody's daughter, who cannot be twenty, prays for a family in the village by name, all six of them, without notes.

You have been coming for a year and a half and you have prayed out loud twice, both times short, both times with your ears going hot, and both times you finished and thought: that sounded like a man reading a shopping list to the ceiling.

So somewhere between last winter and this one, you stopped bringing your own things. Not dramatically. You just stopped putting them in. You bring the village to God because that feels like work you can do, and you take your own house home with you at the end, and you have a private arrangement now that runs something like this: the answers come to the ones who pray properly, and you are not one of them, and that is fine, and you would never say it out loud because it sounds like sulking.

Now come somewhere else.

Dawn on a ridge above a plain, and a man is standing on it. Just standing. He is not in the city below and he does not have family down there that he sees, except one nephew who chose that place years ago and has not been much of a nephew since.

The night before, that man stood in front of God and argued for the city. Not for himself. For a place he did not live in, full of people he had no obligation to, on behalf of the few he thought might be in there. He kept going when a reasonable man would have stopped. Forty five. Forty. Thirty. Twenty. Ten.

And down in the city, the nephew knew nothing about it. Not one word. He was asleep with his door shut, in a place he should never have moved to, and no part of what happened that night was requested by him or earned by him or even known to him.

At first light two visitors take him by the hand and walk him out.

Years later, somebody writing the account puts down the reason in one plain sentence, and it is not a sentence about the nephew at all. God remembered the man on the ridge, and He sent the nephew out.

Read that again and then look at your stacking chair by the back wall.

Kindness arrives for a name that is not yours

That old account is not a story about a good man getting his relative a favor. It is how this whole arrangement works, everywhere, for everybody, and once you see it you will not be able to unsee it.

Kindness comes to a person for the sake of somebody else. It came to a nephew for the sake of an uncle on a ridge. Generations later, a whole royal line kept its lamp burning in Jerusalem, and the reason written down is not that the kings were praying well. It was for David's sake. The same shape every time: someone is inside it, and the kindness reaching them arrives under another person's name.

Now put yourself in that. Not as a hard case, because you are not one. You are inside this on exactly the same footing as the woman in the blue cardigan, and the footing is not her fluency and never was. Scripture says Christ is able to save completely those who come to God through Him, because He always lives to speak for them, and the Holy Spirit is the One taking that sentence and standing it up in a room with eleven chairs in it.

Wherefore he is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them.Hebrews 7:25

Sit on the word ever. Not sometimes, not when prompted, not when somebody remembers to ask Him. Always, continually, at this hour, for you, by name, with nobody having tapped Him on the shoulder about it.

The old man in the flat cap is in on the same terms

Here is the thing your arrangement got wrong, and it got it wrong in a way that seems humble and is actually a ranking system.

You built a ladder. At the top of it are the people who pray well, and at the bottom is you, and the rule of the ladder is that answers fall from the top down. It felt like modesty. It was arithmetic, and it was doing you harm every Wednesday.

There is no ladder. The old man with the flat cap is not answered because of the four sentences. He is answered on the strength of the same name you would use, and if you asked him he would tell you so faster than anybody. What his years have given him is not access. It is ease, which is a lovely thing and an entirely different thing, and it is the sort of thing that comes to people who kept asking.

So take this now, in the chair you are actually sitting in tonight. You have the same access to the Father as anybody who has ever prayed in that room, and it was given to you on the strength of Christ rather than on your delivery. It is written, it was settled at a cross, and His Spirit is the One who carries what you say into the throne room, which means the thing you thought was a shopping list arrives as a son's request.

And there are terms, and I want to name them plainly. God's part is the standing, the access, and a Son who never stops speaking for you. Your part is to ask. Not to ask well. To ask.