The Margin That Ran Out

She writes his name in the same margin every year, down the side of the same page, and this year she got to the bottom and there was nowhere left to put it.

It started as one line in pencil, small, with the date beside it. She was not making a system. She had the Bible open on the table that first year and she wrote his name where her eye happened to be, and then the next year it seemed right to put it under the first one, and by the fourth year it was a column, and by the seventh she was writing smaller on purpose.

The page is soft where her thumb goes. Nine names, all the same name, nine dates. The pencil has gone silver on the early ones and you have to turn the page to the window to read the first two.

This morning she got to the bottom of the margin. There is about a quarter inch of white left and her hand hovered over it and she did not write. She turned the book sideways and looked at the top margin, and then she closed it, and she sat there at the table with her hands flat on the cover.

Because there is a thing under those nine names that she has never once said out loud, and it came up at her this morning when the room ran out. Somewhere in there the writing stopped being asking and turned into paying. Nine years of it, every morning, and if she is honest she believes something quiet and terrible: that the writing is holding him up. That she is servicing an account. That if she misses, or slacks off, or gets careless with the wording, something drops.

She is tired in a way she cannot explain to her own family, and it is not from the caring. It is from carrying a weight nobody ever handed her.

That is you, perhaps, with your own margin, or your own list on the visor, or your own name you have said at the same hour for years. And the tiredness is not from the loving. It is from the accounting.

The man who is only in the Bible for praying

There is a man in Colossians whose whole recorded life is the thing going on at your table.

Epaphras, who is one of you, a servant of Christ, saluteth you, always labouring fervently for you in prayers, that ye may stand perfect and complete in all the will of God.Colossians 4:12

That is nearly everything Scripture says about Epaphras. He is one of them, he is a servant of Christ, and he works at praying for them like it is a job of work. Paul is the one telling them. Epaphras is not in the room. He probably never heard the letter read.

Now look at two things in that sentence, because both of them are for you.

The first is what he asked for. Not a result he had designed. He prayed that they would stand perfect and complete in all the will of God, which is a way of saying he handed them over rather than steering them. The praying man in Scripture is not running the outcome. He is putting people into the hands of the One who does.

The second is the labor. Paul uses a wrestling word there, and I know what a woman with a nine year margin does with a wrestling word, so let me get in front of it. The labor is not a lever. Paul does not say the Colossians got results in proportion to how hard Epaphras sweated. He is describing love that will not sit down, not a price being met. Nobody in that letter is told that more effort would have bought more.

You are standing in the same place Epaphras stood, and that is a real place with real standing in it. Colossians 4:12 is where that man is written down, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a woman at a kitchen table part of the same work rather than a woman with a habit.

Somebody has been praying all along

Now the thing I most want you to have, because I think it is the piece that has been missing from your table for nine years.

This asking is not yours alone. And I do not mean your church and I do not mean me, though both of those are true. I mean this.

Wherefore he is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them.Hebrews 7:25

He ever liveth to make intercession. Jesus is praying. Right now, without stopping, without getting tired, without needing a margin, for the person whose name is nine times down the side of your page. Your nine years of pencil are joining something already in progress, and they were never the thing holding him up.

And the same is written of the Spirit in you: that when a person does not know how to ask, He takes it up Himself and carries it. That is Romans 8:26, and it means the mornings when your prayer was four words and your mind was on the stove were not deficient mornings. They were carried mornings.

You have never once been the thing holding him up, and the weight you have been carrying was never assigned to you. Hebrews 7:25 says Jesus ever lives to make intercession, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes up what you cannot say, so the account you thought you were servicing does not exist and never did.

So let me say the hard pair together, right here where it is hottest.

God heals. I will say it as plainly on this page as I do on the others, because it is written and it is who He is.

And I do not promise you the result for him. I cannot, and I would be lying, and whatever happens in that young man's body is God's to decide and not the yield on nine years of mornings. If it does not go the way you asked, that will not be because you missed a day, or wrote it wrong, or ran out of margin. Nobody at this table failed to have enough faith. That sentence is not in the book and it is not true, and I want it off your kitchen table.

And one more thing, said plain, because I mean it, and because the person carrying somebody else is the one nobody thinks to ask about. If these nine years have taken you somewhere darker than tired, if some part of you has caught itself thinking everybody would manage better without you, tell a living person today and not tomorrow. In the United States, call or text 988 and somebody answers. Anywhere else, your local crisis line, and one human being who can sit at that table with you tonight. A page cannot sit down with you. A person can, and you deserve one.