The Lid on the Sunday Pot

The lid does not sit flat anymore. It got left on a hot burner some years back and it warped on one side, so now it rides up about a quarter of an inch at the handle and you have to turn it until it drops.

Sunday, and the pot has been on since eleven. Three plastic containers on the counter with their lids stacked beside them. The blue cooler is already open on the floor by the door with a folded dish towel in the bottom so nothing slides. This is the fourth year of this, and everything about it has a system now: what goes in first, which container is hers and which is for the neighbor across the hall because she will give half of it away anyway, and how tight the lid has to be for the drive.

Twenty five minutes across town. The elevator in her building has been out since March, so it is four flights with the cooler, and he does it in one trip because doing it in two makes it a bigger deal than he wants it to be.

Here is what he notices at the light on Alameda, and it is the reason for this whole page.

He is praying. He is always praying on that drive, it is the one quiet stretch in the week, and he has been doing it for four years. But listen to what he is actually saying. Lord, let it still be warm when I get up there. Let her eat some of it and not just push it around. Let the rice not have gone dry in the container. Let her have had a good night.

That is it. That is the whole prayer. He is praying about the food.

And at some point in the last month or so he stopped saying her name to God at all. Not on purpose. It is just that he said it for four years, every way he knew how, in every posture, with every promise attached to it, and at some point the sentences ran out, and what was left was a man in a car asking God about rice.

He is not proud of it. At the light he sits there feeling like a fraud with a cooler in the back seat.

That is you, perhaps, with your own version of the pot. You are still showing up. Nobody could say you are not showing up. But the praying has gotten small and practical and it embarrasses you, and there is a suspicion running underneath the whole thing that says the reason nothing has changed is that you have stopped praying properly.

You did not run out of faith, you ran out of sentences

Let me take that suspicion off the table first, because you have been carrying it up four flights along with the cooler.

You have not stopped praying. You have run out of new ways to say the same thing, which is not the same failure at all and is not actually a failure. Four years of asking for one person will do that to anybody's vocabulary. What is left when the eloquence goes is not less faith. It is the same love with fewer adjectives, which is why it came out as rice.

Now here is a man in Scripture whose prayer had no adjectives in it either.

The nobleman saith unto him, Sir, come down ere my child die.John 4:49

Look at what that is. A father. Not a religious man by trade, a man with a position and a household, and he has come a day's walk to say eleven words to a stranger about a boy at home. There is no preamble. There is no formula. There is nothing eloquent, nothing theological, nothing you could put on a card. He is a parent who has run out of everything except the asking, and the asking is all he brought.

You are that man on the road, and what you have brought is enough to be bringing. John 4:49 is not the record of a well constructed prayer, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an unpolished sentence like that and shows a man in a car on Alameda that his own has not been rejected for being about rice.

You have been praying this whole time, and God has been hearing a son ask about his mother, whatever the words on the surface were. It is written that the Lord looks on the heart rather than on the outward appearance, and His Spirit is the One who reads what is underneath a sentence about warm food.

The outcome was never handed to you

Now the heavier thing, and I want to be careful with it, because this is where people who love somebody get quietly crushed.

Somewhere in four years you picked up a job that was never assigned to you. You started keeping score. How consistent you have been. Whether you prayed properly on the drive or just thought about it. Whether the month you were exhausted and did not pray much is the month something slipped. And underneath all of it sits the arithmetic: if I had prayed harder, or longer, or better, or with more people, something would have moved by now.

That arithmetic is false. Nobody failed to have enough faith here, and no prayer of yours was too short to count. That sentence is not in the book and it is not true. There is no verse anywhere that puts another person's body on your shoulders and grades you on the result, and if you have been told there is, you were told wrong, however gently and however sincerely.

Look at what the nobleman actually carried, and look at what Jesus carried.

Jesus saith unto him, Go thy way; thy son liveth. And the man believed the word that Jesus had spoken unto him, and he went his way.John 4:50

The man carried the asking and then he carried the word home. That is his whole part. He did not carry the healing, he did not sustain it with his effort on the road, and there is not one syllable suggesting the outcome depended on how well he asked.

And I have to say the honest half here, because I am not going to use that story on you as a promise. Yes, in that account the boy lived. And I do not promise you the result for the person you love. I cannot and I will not, and no honest voice can. God heals. He heals bodies, that is His character and His written word and not a rumor, and this site was built to say it out loud. And what He does with the person you are cooking for is His, and I will not tell you what it is going to be, and anyone who does is not speaking for Him. Both halves are true and I am holding both in front of you at once.

You are not carrying the outcome, and it was never once placed in your hands. John 4:50 puts the word in the man's hands and the healing in the Lord's, and it is His Spirit who carries what you say over her from a car on a Sunday, not the intensity you manage to say it with.

And one more thing, and I mean it as much as anything on this page. Caring for somebody for years will wear a person to the boards. If this has taken you somewhere darker than tired, if you have caught yourself thinking they would all be better off without you, tell one human being today and not tomorrow. In the United States, call or text 988. Anywhere else, your local crisis line, and one person who can sit with you tonight. A page is not enough for that. You deserve somebody beside you, and you are allowed to be the one who needs looking after.