Pray For The Situation

Would you pray about the situation.

That is the whole of it. That is the entire briefing you have been given, four or five times a year, for about eleven years, and every time you have said yes and every time you have done it properly.

You know how to pray for a thing you do not know. You have got quite good at it, honestly. You pray around the edges of it. You pray for whoever it is, and for whoever else it touches, and for the person who does know, and you sit with it in the morning for as long as it wants and you do not push.

And then, some months later, you find out what it was. Not because anybody told you. You find out because it resolves, and then it becomes a story people tell, and you are standing in a kitchen holding a plate when somebody says, well, after everything with Gareth's brother, and three people nod, and you understand that you have been praying about Gareth's brother since February.

Nobody was hiding it from you. That is what makes this so hard to hold. There was no decision. The information moved through the building the way water moves through a house, along the routes that already existed, and your route only ever carries requests.

Here is what has changed lately and it is why you are reading this.

Last month you were asked again. And for the first time in eleven years, something in you went flat before you said yes.

Not resentment. You would recognize resentment and deal with it. This was tiredness, in a place you did not know could get tired, and you have been unsettled by it ever since, because if that goes then you do not know what you are for.

Hannah's song does not say what people think it says

There is a song a woman sang in a doorway after she handed over the only child she had, and people quote the middle of it and skip the line that is doing the heavy work.

He raiseth up the poor out of the dust, and lifteth up the beggar from the dunghill, to set them among princes, and to make them inherit the throne of glory.1 Samuel 2:8

Read where they end up. Not fed. Not comforted. Not looked after.

Among princes. Inheriting a throne.

Hannah is not singing about relief being handed down. She is singing about position being handed over, and she sings it as a woman who has been on the receiving end of years of a room's opinion about her and has just watched God overturn it entirely.

So take this before we go on, standing in whatever kitchen you are standing in. You are among princes in that house. That is what is written over the person the room has quietly filed under useful, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the setting, and He has never once set somebody among princes and then handed them half a sentence.

Praying is not the small job

Now I want to be plain, because there is a version of this that would make you bitter and a version that would make you saccharine and neither one is any use to a woman standing in a kitchen with a plate.

Praying is not the small job. Let us have that straight. Eleven years of a woman getting up early and holding a family in front of God is the most consequential thing happening in that congregation and it will still be echoing when the committee minutes have rotted.

But being trusted with prayer and not with knowledge is a shape, and the shape says something, and you have read it correctly. The written word sets the lifted among princes, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lifted, and neither of them built the shape you have been reading.

It says: she is safe, she is reliable, she does not need to be brought in.

And the flatness you felt last month is not your faith failing. It is a person who has been given a role without a seat, for eleven years, noticing the arrangement for the first time. That is not a spiritual problem. That is accurate perception arriving late.

You are seated in that house on the same terms as every person who knows the details. His word puts the lifted among princes, and the Holy Spirit did the lifting, and no route that information takes through a building has ever had authority over that.

The plain hall and the shape of a room

In 1895 a man named Phineas Bresee opened a plain hall near the middle of Los Angeles and made one rule about it that has outlasted everybody: no seat in that room was for rent.

I like plain things and that is about as plain as a decision gets. But the reason it worked was not plainness. It was that it removed a shape.

A room with bought pews has a shape, and the shape does the talking. It says who the church runs on, it says it every week, and it says it without anybody having to be unkind or even aware. And the people in the shape's lower half do not usually get told anything either. They get asked to do things. They get thanked.

Bresee could not make people equal by preaching at them. Nobody can. What he could do was refuse to build the shape into the furniture, and then let a room without a shape teach people what he could not.

Your building has a shape and nobody built it deliberately. You have been reading it for eleven years and you read it right.

But the written word gave you your place in it and the Holy Spirit set you there, so what a shape says about you is not what God says about you and never has been.