The One Thing She Never Prayed About

The light goes off that ridge in about eleven minutes when it goes, and Iva is on the porch for all of it, the way she has been most evenings of her life.

Two rocking chairs. One of them has been empty six years and she has not moved it and does not intend to.

She prays out loud out here. Has since she was a girl, when her grandmother did it and she thought it was just how porches worked. Nothing formal. She talks, at conversational volume, to God, about whatever the day contained, and if a neighbor came up those steps mid-sentence she would finish the sentence and then say hello, and nobody in that valley would think anything of it.

Everything goes up on that porch. The weather, which matters here. The road, which is bad. A boy in the family who is in trouble again and whose name she says every single evening without fail. Her knees. The price of things. A woman two hollers over that she does not like and prays for anyway and always has.

Seventy-eight years old and fifty of them out here, out loud.

And there is one thing she has never said on this porch.

Not never mentioned. That is the interesting part and it took her until this evening to see it. She mentions it constantly. It comes up in her praying two or three times a week and has for decades.

She calls it that whole business.

That is the phrase. That whole business, Lord, You know about that. That whole business with what happened. And then she moves on, smoothly, without any sense of having dodged anything, because in her own head she has just prayed about it.

Fifty years of a phrase with a hole in the middle where a name should be.

Tonight she hears herself do it. She says the phrase and then she stops rocking, which is unusual, and she sits on that porch in the last of the light and thinks: I have never once said what it is. Not to Him, not out loud, not in fifty years. And there is nobody alive I could tell now, and there never was anybody I would have told, and I have been carrying a thing I refuse to call by its name to a God who has known about it the whole time.

You have that phrase. Yours has different words in it. But you know the sentence you say instead of the name, and you know how smoothly it goes past.

Paul asks a question nobody has ever answered

Romans 8 builds and builds and then, near the end of it, Paul stops making statements and asks something instead, and the question has never been answered by anybody in two thousand years because it cannot be.

He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?Romans 8:32

It is an argument from the largest thing to everything else.

If He did not hold back the one thing that cost Him most, on what possible ground would He hold back on anything smaller? Try to construct the answer. Take a minute; people have. There is no version of it that stands up, because any reason you could give for Him withholding now would have been a far better reason for Him withholding then.

You are being asked a question about God's withholding, and there is no answer to it. That is the written word and not my encouragement at dusk, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a question from the highest chapter in Romans and lays it on a porch with the light going off a ridge.

And notice which direction the question runs, because this is the part that gets your porch phrase out into the open.

Your phrase, that whole business, is protecting you from something. Not from God finding out; He has known since before you had the words for it. It is protecting you from what you assume happens once the thing is named out loud between the two of you: that it becomes real in a new way, that it becomes His business, that something gets required.

Paul's question runs the other way entirely. He does not ask what you will have to hand over. He asks what could possibly be held back from you by a God who did not hold back His own Son.

Spared not is a deliberate echo

There is one more thing in that verse and it is a piece of craft, and it is worth seeing because it is doing pastoral work.

He that spared not his own Son.

That phrase, spared not, is a deliberate echo. It is the same language used of Abraham on the mountain: thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son, from me.

Paul knew exactly what he was doing. He takes the sentence God spoke to a man who did not withhold, and he turns it round and says it about God.

Which means the God who asks you not to withhold is not asking for something He has kept back Himself. He went first. Whatever this is, whatever the name is that you have not said in fifty years, you are not being asked to do something God has been unwilling to do.

This is yours, and the One asking went first, and it is already settled. Romans 8 uses the echo on purpose, and the same Spirit who is groaning with us four verses earlier in that chapter is the one making it a present fact in a woman who has stopped rocking.

Let me guard this properly, the way I would want it guarded for myself.

I have not guessed what your business is. There is no list here and there never was going to be, and if you were braced for it, you can let that go.

And you have not lost anything by fifty years of the phrase. Fifty years of praying on a porch, out loud, in a valley, is not undone by a hole in the middle of one sentence. God has been receiving all of it, and He is not standing on those steps with an account of your evasions.

And I am not telling you to tell anybody. That is not the instruction. You said yourself there is nobody now and there never was. The naming that matters here is out loud, in your own voice, to Him, and the question of whether a person ever hears it is not settled by this article.