Still in the Seat

The pastor says the words he says every Sunday evening, and the band drops to a hum, and the line begins to form at the front.

If you need prayer tonight, come. That is all he says, and he means it, and the room answers the way it always does: a chair scrapes, then another, and people move down the side aisle toward the front, where three or four from the team are already waiting with their hands open. A young man goes up quickly, as if he has been waiting all service. A grandmother is helped along by her daughter. Somebody's teenager goes on his own, which makes his mother cry two rows back. The keys keep turning over the same four chords and the whole room is soft with it, and for eleven years Anne has stood up at exactly this moment and gone.

Tonight she does not stand up.

She is in the back row, on the end, with her coat still on. Her hand has gone, without her telling it to, to the place in her body that she has carried to that front line eleven years running, and it rests there, quietly, the way it always does. She is not angry. She has not stopped believing that God heals; she believes it as plainly as she believes the chairs are gray. What she cannot do tonight is take one more sentence. The kind woman who leaned in last spring and asked whether there might be something standing in the way. The man who lent her a book. The friend who said, so gently, that perhaps she was holding on to it too tightly. Eleven years of hands on her shoulders, every one of them warm, and every one of them, without meaning to, handing her a small folded verdict on the way out.

So she stays in the seat. And here is the thing about her that nobody in the room can see, because it is happening under a coat with a hand on it: she is still asking. She has not left. She has not stopped. She has simply run out of room for a verdict, and she is sitting where she is with the four chords going and the line at the front getting shorter, and God, whom she has never once accused of leaving, somewhere in the row with her, she hopes. She hopes.

You are the one in the seat. I am not going to ask you what the thing is; you know, and God knows, and it does not need a name from me. I am not going to guess why nothing has changed, because I do not know, and anyone who tells you they know is handing you a burden with a bow on it. What I have to say is smaller and it is written down. It is about one word in one psalm, and the word is heard.

He has not hidden His face

Let me name the pit before I say a single bright thing, because a bright thing said too early over this seat is not comfort, it is one more hand on the shoulder.

Here is the weight. It is not only the thing in your body. It is the years, and what they have been quietly saying. Every unanswered month has felt like a mark against your name. Every well meant sentence has landed as a small charge on a sheet nobody told you was being kept. And underneath it, the sentence never said aloud, because it would sound like unbelief: if He were really with me, would it still be like this? Eleven years is a long time to sit under a suspicion. I am not going to hurry you out from under it with a verse. I am going to sit in the row with you and read one.

For he has not despised or abhorred the affliction of the afflicted, and he has not hidden his face from him, but has heard, when he cried to him.Psalm 22:24

Read the shape of that sentence, because the shape is the mercy. It does not say the affliction ended. It says three things about God while the affliction was still standing in the room. He has not despised it. He has not hidden His face from the one carrying it. And when the afflicted one cried out, He heard. Not answered as asked; the psalm does not claim that, and neither will I. Heard, and not turned away. You are not despised for the thing you carry, and He has not hidden His face from you, and I am not the one saying so; it is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line from an old song and makes it a room a person can sit in.

Now hold this gently. It is the psalm Jesus prayed from the cross. It opens with My God, my God, why have You forsaken me, and He said those words out loud, in the dark, with the thing not lifted. The night before, in a garden, He had asked for the cup to pass, three times, on His face, and the cup did not pass. So when I say the One you are asking has been on the asking side of an unanswered prayer, I am not being clever. The seat you are in has been sat in by the Son of God, and He was not disqualified in it, and His Father had not moved one inch away from Him in it, and three mornings later heaven proved that heard was the true word all along. I am not naming a purpose for your unanswered thing. I am saying He knows the inside of that seat, and He is not standing at the front waiting for you. He is in the row.

Nothing standing in the way that He has not walked through

I need to say the site's own sentence plainly, in my own mouth, and not at the end where it would sound like small print. God heals. I believe it with my whole chest. And I do not promise you the result, because I am not the one who sends the current; I flip the switch, which is to say I read you His word out loud, and He does what He does, and He is good in both the answering and the waiting. What I will not do, ever, is put the outcome on your shoulders. You have not been placed on trial in that seat, and Scripture holds no record of anyone being sent from the presence of God for having asked a long time; His Spirit does not keep that kind of book on you.

Hear this too, because it is the thing the folded verdicts never told you. When the same words have worn smooth over so many years that you cannot feel them any more, you have not been praying alone. Paul writes that the Spirit Himself helps us in our weakness, for we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words (Romans 8:26). Do you hear what that means for the back row? On the nights the words ran out, He was praying it. On the Sunday you could not stand up, He was in the seat with you, groaning the thing you could not say. You have never once prayed this on your own, and the written word says the Holy Spirit is the one carrying it when your voice gives out, which means the prayer did not stop when you sat down.

Two things stand between you and this row, and I would rather name them than let them sit there in silence. One says that presence in an unanswered thing was for David and for Paul, not for a woman with her coat on in a church hall. But Hebrews 4:15-16 says we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, and so we draw near with confidence to the throne of grace to find help in time of need. Draw near. Not qualify first, and in the time of need, which is exactly the time you are in. The other says that if you really trusted Him you would either be well by now or you would have stopped asking, and that sitting in the seat still asking is some kind of failure. I know the sound of that one, because there was a season when praise went silent in me and I sang anyway on empty, and a song sung dry is not a lesser song to Him. Sitting still and still asking is not unbelief. It is the most faithful thing in the room. You are held in Christ while nothing in your body has changed, and Paul says nothing in all creation is able to separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus, and His Spirit is the one bearing witness with your spirit, tonight, that you are His child and not His defendant.

Two more things, because I love you. Keep every appointment and every medicine you have been given; the God who hears you is not in competition with the people caring for your body. And if the years have taken you somewhere dark, if the seat has started to feel like a place you might not get up from, tell one human being tonight, and if you are in any danger reach the crisis line where you live and let a real voice stay with you. That is not leaving the presence of God. He is in that room too.