The Prayer Through the Wall

Gerry is the one they ask, and he has never once worked out why.

It is not that he is impressive. He fits kitchens for a living, he is fifty three, and he could not tell you the difference between two theological words if you laid them side by side. But somewhere over about twenty years it became understood, in that street and in that congregation, that if a thing is bad, you ring Gerry, and Gerry comes, and Gerry prays out loud in the room, and something in the room settles.

On the Tuesday it was Ruth's daughter, and the family room at the end of the ward, and the vending machine humming in the corridor and a box of tissues nobody was using.

Gerry prayed the way he always prays. Which is to say plainly, without any performance, with his hand on the back of a plastic chair, and with a certainty in his voice that anybody in the room would have described as the real thing, because it was the real thing. He was not working himself up. He meant every syllable. He believed, entirely and without a crack in it, that God was in that corridor and that God was good to that girl.

At about eleven Ruth walked him down to the doors and said the thing that broke him open, though she had no idea she was doing it.

She said: I could hear you through the wall. I was in the other room and I could hear you through the wall, and I believed it.

He drove home. He got as far as his own street and stopped outside his own house with the engine running, because there was something he had been carrying for four years and had never once brought to God properly, and he thought, with the ward still in his hands: right. Now do that for yourself.

And nothing came.

Not doubt exactly. Not a wall of unbelief. Something much stranger and much smaller. What came out of his mouth, in the dark, in a parked van, was: I think so. I think You would. I am not sure.

He sat with that for a long time and felt like a fraud, and the word he used about himself was one you have probably used about yourself.

But it was not fraud, and it took him another year to see what it actually was.

He had built a wall. He had put every ounce of his faith on the far side of it, where other people live, and he had kept his own side of it bare, and he had been doing that so long that he had stopped noticing there was a wall there at all. Ruth heard the real thing through it. She was right. It was the real thing. It was just aimed away from him.

Nobody asked him to tidy it up

I am not going to argue with you.

I want to say that at the top, because there has almost certainly been arguing already, and by good people, and it has almost certainly not helped. Somebody has taken you through the reasons. Somebody has pointed out, kindly and correctly, that you believe it for everybody else, so logically it must apply to you. And every step of it was agreed with, and you walked away carrying exactly what you walked in with, and then felt worse, because now here was somebody who could not even be argued into it.

Doubt of your kind is not a hole in your reasoning. So filling in reasoning does nothing. What you actually carry is a wall, and walls are not taken down by being explained to.

So instead I want to put one sentence in your hands. Not mine. A man said it out loud, in a crowd, in front of everybody, about the thing that mattered most in his life, and it was written down and kept for three thousand mornings like this one.

His son had been ill since childhood. He had already asked people who could not help. And he comes to Jesus and says, and you can hear the years in it, if you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.

And Jesus said to him, "If you can! All things are possible for one who believes." Immediately the father of the child cried out and said, "I believe; help my unbelief!"Mark 9:23-24

Now stop, and do not let anybody improve that sentence for you, including me.

It is not a confession of faith with a small apology attached. It is not a man believing and then modestly understating it. It is two things at once, said in one breath, by somebody who was past managing his own presentation. I believe. True. Help my unbelief. Also true. Both, at the same moment, in the same mouth, about the same thing.

That is the honest version of your prayer, and it is in the Bible, word for word, and nobody edited it out.

Mark 9 was written long before this van, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes what is written and lays it on a real person in a real street.

And here is what you must not skip, because it is the whole reason this account is in the Gospel. Look at what Jesus does next.

He does not correct him. He does not say, come back once it is settled. He does not take him aside for a discussion about the nature of faith. He does not ask him to say it again with more conviction, or to remove the second half, or to go away and work on himself and return when the sentence has been cleaned up.

He gets on with it.

The father is received exactly as he arrives, halves and all, and the divided prayer is treated as a real prayer, because it was one. Nothing in the text suggests Jesus found it thin. What He found was a man who had stopped pretending, and pretending is the only thing that had been in the way.

So take this in before anything else. You are received in the divided state you are actually in, and the receiving is not waiting on a tidier sentence; that is what is written, and His Spirit is the one who carries it.

So let me say plainly what this means for the thing you have not brought.

There has been a waiting here to feel sure before asking, and the waiting has cost years. And I want to be very clear about where the burden sits, because you may have been told otherwise: nothing that has not yet come to you is being withheld because your believing is the wrong shape. That is not how He deals with people, and this account is the proof of it. The father of that boy did not qualify. He simply spoke, and he spoke honestly, and honest is not the same as certain.

And God does this today, in ordinary streets, for ordinary people who are absolutely sure He is good to everyone but them. He is doing it exactly where this van is parked. It is not for whoever seems to have a cleaner faith. It is for you, personally, in the exact divided state you are actually in. That is what is written, and His Spirit is the one doing it.