The One Nobody Gets To Pray For

She has prayed on that street for nineteen years and everybody knows it.

She prayed with the family at number twelve the night the ambulance came, standing in the hall in her coat. She prays with the woman at the corner shop before she opens on a Monday. She has a list, an actual paper list, and it goes in her bag, and there are names on it she has been carrying for a decade.

Last Sunday two women came over after the service, kind and unhurried, and one of them put a hand out toward her shoulder and said: can we pray for you.

She stepped back. Not rudely. She stepped back and laughed and said, oh, I am fine, pray for Marian, Marian is the one who needs it.

They prayed for Marian. Marian did need it.

And on the way home she felt what she always feels, which is a kind of relief with something underneath it, and she did not look at the something.

She has told herself for years that this is what a servant does. Everybody else first. That is humility, is it not.

If you have your own version of stepping back from a hand on your shoulder, you know exactly what I mean. And it is quite possible nobody has ever told you the stepping back is not humility.

The thing you were warned about is not the thing you are doing

Let me say the plain thing first, because you may have been waiting a very long time for anybody to say it out loud where you could hear it.

Humility was never a low opinion of yourself. It never was. Whoever handed you that handed it over meaning well, and it was wrong.

And it was not foolish of you to take it. I want to be exact, because nothing else gets in until it is said. You took an instruction from people you trusted, you kept it faithfully for years at real cost, and keeping a badly worded instruction is loyalty aimed at the wrong number. There is nothing in it to be ashamed of.

Now read what God says about when the loving started, and read it with your own name in it.

The LORD hath appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.Jeremiah 31:3

Everlasting means both ends. Not only that it will not run out ahead of you, but that it did not begin at some point behind you when you started being useful. There is no date on it. There was no first day of it.

You were loved before you carried anybody, and you were drawn before you were any help to anyone. That is not my encouragement. It is written in Jeremiah 31:3, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who carries a written line past a woman's ears into the place where she actually lives.

And look at the order of the verse. The love comes first, and the drawing comes out of it, and the drawing is done with lovingkindness rather than with a job. He did not draw you in order to staff a street. He drew you because He loved you, and the street came after.

So stepping back from that hand has not been humility. You have a love that was never earned by service, and it is already yours before Sunday and after it. The word settled that before you had a list, and the same Spirit who inspired it is walking home with you while you read this.

Refusing is not the same as serving

Here is the thing to name plainly, because you have been keeping it just below the surface for years.

To be prayed for is to be the one in need in the room. It is to stop being the one who is fine. And if you have spent nineteen years being the one who is fine, that is not a small step to the side; it is a change of position, and part of you knows exactly what it would cost.

That is not pride and I am not calling it pride. Nobody is diagnosing you here. It is a defense, and it was probably built for good reasons a long time ago.

But look at what it does to the street. Nineteen years of one way traffic teaches your neighbors that you are a source rather than a person. They will keep asking, because they love you, but they will stop expecting. And the day you actually cannot stand up, they will not know how to come.

You have permission to be the one in the middle of the circle, and the permission was given rather than earned by finally deserving it. Jeremiah 31 says He loved you with an everlasting love; His Spirit is the one who makes a woman able to stand still with a hand on her shoulder and not step back.

One plain word before we go on, because a page cannot see the room you are in. If part of the reason you cannot be prayed for is that somebody near you punishes you for having a need, nothing here is telling you to absorb that. Reaching for help is not a failure of humility, and in the United States 988 answers by call or text at any hour.