I Answered It In The Middle Of Praying

It was the ping and Cheryl's hand went, and she had been mid-sentence.

Not mid-sentence in a conversation. Mid-sentence in a prayer. Out loud, on her knees, at the side of her own bed, at twenty past six in the morning, in the middle of asking God about her son.

She read it. It was nothing. It was a delivery notification for a thing she had not been waiting for.

And she put the phone down and she was still on her knees and she opened her mouth and could not remember where she had been.

She is forty-eight and she has been praying like this since she was twenty-two. This is not a woman with a thin prayer life. She has a chair she prays in when it is cold, and she has a list, and she has prayed people through things in that room that nobody else on earth knows about, at hours nobody would believe.

And her hand went for a ping in the middle of asking God about her own son.

Here is what she has done with that for four days, and it is the reason I am writing to her rather than about her: she has been treating it as a scandal. As evidence. She has been sitting with the thought that a woman who does that has something wrong with her heart, and that all those years might have been a performance she was doing without noticing.

If my hand goes for a delivery notification while I am praying for my child, what does that say about what I actually love?

And here is where I stop talking about Cheryl, because it happened to you too, or something like it, and you have been quietly making it mean something enormous.

Let me say the first thing before we go one inch further, and I want it said plainly and with no wriggle in it: your hand going is not a verdict on your love. It is a trained reflex, built deliberately by other people, and it fires faster than intention does. That is not an excuse. It is an accurate description, and you cannot fix what you have described wrongly.

He defends the one who is not managing everything

Let me set the true thing down first, because you have spent four days building a case against yourself.

You are not on trial and He is not the prosecution. There is a scene where somebody is genuinely distracted, genuinely pulled in several directions, and it is worth watching very carefully what Jesus actually does with her: And it is the Holy Spirit who makes that land in you rather than merely read well.

And Jesus answered and said to her, Martha, Martha, you are careful and troubled about many things: but one thing is needful: and Mary has chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.Luke 10:41-42

Read the tone before the content. He says her name twice, which in that language is not a rebuke, it is tenderness. He then describes her condition accurately, careful and troubled about many things, which is exactly what a divided attention feels like from the inside, and He does it without contempt.

And then He does not hand her a discipline. He names one thing as necessary and says of the one who has it that it shall not be taken away from her.

That is the sentence to carry out of this. The good part is not fragile. It is not something a woman loses because her hand went at a ping. It is described as the thing that cannot be taken.

So the twenty past six on your knees is not a scandal, and Scripture is where I stand that rather than my own reassurance, and God's Spirit was in that room for the whole prayer, including the part where you could not find your place again.

A reflex is not a love

Now let me separate two things that got welded together in your head four days ago.

The reflex is real. It is not imaginary and it is not harmless: a hand that moves before a person decides is a genuine hold on an attention, and it should be dealt with rather than laughed off.

But a reflex is not a preference. Your body flinches at a loud noise and that says nothing about your courage. Your hand goes at a ping, and it says something about training and nothing about what you love.

The evidence about what you love is everywhere else and you have been ignoring all of it: twenty-six years of mornings, a list, a chair for the cold, and people carried through things in that room at hours nobody would believe.

Hear this: your attention belongs to you and it can be retrained, and the good part you chose has not been taken from you and cannot be. That is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it something you can stand on this morning rather than something you would like to believe about yourself.

And the practical half, plainly, because a message without it has failed you. If your attention has got hard to hold generally, that is worth real help and none of it is small faith. A counselor is not an overreaction. A doctor is worth telling if the reaching is toward worry rather than boredom, or if you cannot sit still with anything any more. And one friend told in daylight, because a thing like this stays enormous while it is private and shrinks the moment it is said out loud to somebody who loves you.