The Wobble In The Middle Of The Prayer

You were about halfway through and it was going well.

Your hand was on her back and the room was quiet and the words were coming the way they come when you are not thinking about them, and everybody in that circle knew something was happening.

And then, for about half a second, something in you went sideways.

Not a thought exactly. Nothing you could write down. More like the floor of you shifting slightly, and a small flat voice underneath the prayer saying something along the lines of: and what if none of this.

And then it passed and you carried on and you finished, and she cried and hugged you and said thank you about six times.

And you drove home with that half second sitting in the passenger seat.

That was four months ago. You have prayed for people since and it has been fine and you are not in crisis about any of this.

But you have kept it. You put it somewhere and you have taken it out a few times since to look at it, and every time you look at it, it says the same thing about you, which is that a woman who wobbles in the middle of a prayer is not what she has been telling people she is.

Hear me before we go anywhere.

I am not correcting you.

You did not sin in that half second. There is nothing to confess and nothing you should have done differently, and I am not going to describe a wobble as a leak.

I am saying I know what is in the passenger seat. That is all.

He knows the frame

Here is a line about what God takes into account.

Like as a father pitieth his children, so the LORD pitieth them that fear him. For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust.Psalm 103:13-14

He knoweth our frame.

Frame is a construction word. It is the shape of the thing, the way it was put together, what it can bear.

And the psalm says God knows it, and then it goes further and says He remembers, which is an odd thing to say about somebody who never forgets. The word is being used the way you would use it about a person who keeps something in mind while dealing with you.

He does not deal with anybody as though they were made of something else. He remembers the material, and His Spirit is the one who works through it.

So I want to turn now and speak this over you, out on that porch with the fan going inside.

You are being dealt with by somebody who knows what you are made of. Not one day, not once you can pray for twenty minutes without a wobble, not when the flat voice stops turning up. Right now, on a warm evening four months on, you are inside the he knoweth our frame clause, and it is offered there as a comfort rather than as an excuse. That is not my sentiment. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who sets a written line down in a real woman on a real porch.

Now the plain thing, and I am not going to put a clause on the end of it.

That half second is not why.

Not why anything. Not why she is where she is now, not why the other one you prayed for last year is where she is. It did not leak out of you into the room and it did not reach the ceiling and get counted.

I am not going to say something careful about praying in faith, because a careful sentence there is exactly how a woman ends up auditing her own prayers for the rest of her life.

The wobble was your frame doing what a frame does under load. It was dust behaving like dust. And the psalm says that is precisely what He is remembering while He works.

And this next part is settled rather than pending, so hear it. You have a God who was not startled by half a second, and He has never once revised what He is doing on the basis of a passing flat voice. The word says he remembereth, and remembering is what He is doing on purpose while He answers, and it is His Spirit who carries a written line into a real evening on a real street.

She cried and hugged you six times. Whatever was in the room was not being supplied by your steadiness.