The Last Three Feet of the Rail

She works the rail from the left end, and she has done it for eleven years, and people ask for her by name.

Sunday night, the second service, the one where the room is smaller and nobody is watching the clock. The music has gone down to one instrument. There is a line at the front and she starts at the left, on her knees, with her hand flat between somebody's shoulder blades, and she prays out loud, and her voice carries. That is the thing about her. It carries to the back. Half the people at that rail are there because she is the one who prays like she means it, and she does mean it, every single time.

She goes down the line on her knees. She does not rush anybody. She knows most of their situations and she never says any of them out loud, which is why she is trusted with them. And when she gets to about three feet from the right hand end, she stands up.

She stands up and she goes and gets the box of tissues, or she goes to find the pastor's wife, or she remembers that somebody needs the side door unlocked. Every week. It happens so smoothly that nobody in eleven years has ever noticed, including, for a long while, her.

Because somebody else always takes that end. That is how she has arranged it. And she has arranged it because four years ago she was kneeling at that end herself, on the other side of the rail, and she brought her own thing up there for what turned out to be the last time. She can give you the date. The second Sunday in March. She could tell you what she was wearing.

She has never brought it since. Not once, not out loud, not on her knees, not in the car, not at three in the morning. And it is not that she stopped believing. She would have been able to explain unbelief. It is that a person only has so much of a particular kind of strength, the kind it takes to open a subject up again, and hers ran out on the second Sunday in March, and she has never gone back to the shelf where she used to keep it.

So she carries everybody else's asking to the front of the room every Sunday night, and leaves her own in the car.

That is you, perhaps, with your own three feet of rail. Your own patch of floor you do not kneel on. And you would not be able to explain it either if somebody asked you, which is exactly why nobody has, because you are the one people come to and nobody thinks to check on the person who is checking on everybody.

The one you leave in the car

Let me get one thing out of the way first, and I want to say it with my whole chest, because somebody has probably implied the opposite to you.

Four years of not saying it is not four years of unbelief. It is not backsliding, it is not hardness, it is not a door you shut on God. It is what happens to a person who has opened the same subject too many times and has run out of the specific strength it takes to open it again. God has never once misread that as rebellion, and I am not going to either, and if anybody has told you differently they were guessing about a woman they have not been kneeling next to.

And now let me show you where He was standing during those four years.

The eyes of the LORD are upon the righteous, and his ears are open unto their cry.Psalm 34:15

Look at the grammar of it, because the grammar is the mercy. His ears are open. Not: His ears open when you cry. Not: His ears will open if you come back and cry properly. Open is a standing condition, a state He is in, described in the present tense, and it says nothing at all about the volume or the frequency of anybody's crying.

Which means the four years did not close anything. The ears were open the whole time. Through the second Sunday in March, and every Sunday since, and every night you drove home from the second service with your own thing still in the car, they were open. You did not lose ground you now have to make up. There is no ground.

You are heard by a God whose ears did not close when your mouth did. That is Psalm 34:15 written down, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a standing condition of God and makes a woman on her knees at the left end of a rail actually feel the weight of it.

Nothing here is asking you for a promise

Now, and this is the part I care about most, I am not going to ask you for anything long.

I am not asking you to commit to praying about this every day. I am not asking for a streak, a discipline, a thirty day anything, or a promise that you will keep asking. If you say it tonight and then nothing comes out of you again for another four years, His ears are still open, and I will not be up here counting, and neither is He.

Because that is the trap that shut your mouth in the first place, and I want to name it so it stops working. Somewhere in year two you started believing that asking is a contract. That if you bring it up you have to keep bringing it up, and that stopping again would make you a quitter, and that you would rather never open it than open it and fail. So you did the sensible thing, and you have been sensible for four years, and it has cost you the one subject that matters most to you.

Here is what David was doing when he wrote that psalm, and it is not what you think. Read the heading of Psalm 34. He wrote it after pretending to be out of his mind in front of a foreign king to save his own skin. That is the man telling you the ears are open. Not a man having his best year. A man who had just done something undignified because he was frightened, sitting down afterward to write that God had heard him anyway.

So let me hold the two things this whole site exists to hold, in one breath, right here where the temperature is highest. God heals. He heals bodies, Scripture is not embarrassed about it and neither am I, and four years of your silence has not moved Him one inch further away from doing it. And I do not promise you the result. Not tonight, not on a timeline, not at all, because I was never handed a promise to make and the current belongs to Him. We say what He said. He does what He does. Both of those are true at the same time and I am not going to trade either one away to make this page easier to read.

You have not used up your turn, and there was never a limit posted anywhere. It is written that His ears are open unto their cry, and it is the same Spirit who carried a frightened man's psalm out of a cave who carries a four year old sentence out of a woman at an altar rail.

And one more thing, because it matters more than anything else on this page. If these four years have taken you somewhere darker than tired, if you have caught yourself thinking that this church would run just fine without you in it, tell one human being tonight and not next Sunday. In the United States, call or text 988. Anywhere else, your own local crisis line, and one person who can sit with you tonight. A page cannot sit in a parking lot with you. You deserve somebody who can, and going to find them is not the opposite of faith, it is what faith does with a telephone.