The Note I Stopped Opening

It is still there. Third one down, under the shopping list and the thing about the car insurance.

It is called pray about. You did not name it anything clever because you were nineteen when you started it and you were not trying to be clever, you were just trying not to forget people.

You still add to it. You added to it on Sunday. Somebody at the front asked for prayer for a family and you typed their surname in with your thumbs while the room was still standing.

But you scroll past the top third of it now.

You do it without noticing that you are doing it, which is the part that got your attention this week. Your thumb starts moving before your eye gets there. Everything from about the spring of that year sits up in that section, and the thumb has learned to skip it, and it has been skipping it for a long time.

There is one line in there that you wrote out in full. Not a name. A whole sentence, because at the time it felt important to write down exactly what you were asking for so that you would know it when it came.

You have not read that sentence in two years.

Before we go anywhere, hear me.

I am not telling you off.

Nothing here is a failure. A person who has kept a prayer list since they were nineteen is not a person with a discipline problem, and I am not going to suggest that the thing you stopped asking about has stayed where it is because you stopped asking about it.

I am saying I noticed the thumb. That is all.

Why He told them the story

There is a parable Luke introduces in an unusual way. Normally he tells you the story and lets you work out the point. This time he tells you the point first.

And he spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint.Luke 18:1

And not to faint.

That is the word to sit with. It does not mean and not to sin. It does not mean and not to be lazy. The word is about running out of strength. It describes what happens to a person who has been carrying something a long way and whose arms give out, and Jesus assumed it would happen, and He told a story specifically for the people it happens to.

Which means the top third of your list is not evidence of anything. It is exactly the condition Jesus anticipated and then addressed with a story about a widow who kept turning up.

So I want to turn now and speak this over you, with your phone in your hand.

You are not disqualified by a two year silence. Not one day, not once you have worked up some enthusiasm again. Right now, thumb hovering over a note you have not opened, you are the person that parable was told for, and Jesus told it before you were born to keep exactly this from meaning what you think it means. That is not my reassurance. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who sets a written line down in a real person on a real evening.

Now, why did the thumb learn to skip?

Not unbelief. I want to be careful here, because it has been quietly called unbelief in this house for two years, and it is not.

You stopped opening it because opening it cost something. Every time you read that sentence, you had to hold the gap between what it said and what was actually the case, and holding that gap is tiring in a way that people who have never done it do not understand. So your thumb, which loves you, learned a route around it.

That is not sin. That is what a tired person does, and the word for it is in the verse, and Jesus put it there Himself.

But look at the widow in the story, because she is not held up as an example of great faith. Nobody says she believed well. What she does is keep coming back, and the whole force of the parable is that the judge is nothing like God, and if persistence works on a man like that, then how much more with a Father who is not reluctant at all.

And this next part is settled rather than pending, so hear it. You have a standing invitation that did not lapse while the note stayed shut. The word says always, and always is a word that covers the two years as well as tonight, and it is His Spirit who carries a written promise into a real hand holding a real phone.

Nothing in that note expired. Notes do not expire. That is not how any of this works.