The Pen That Stopped Moving

Nine people on mismatched chairs in the side room, the radiator ticking, and it comes round to her.

Tuesday prayer meeting. It has been Tuesday for eleven years. The leader has a notebook on his knee where he writes the requests down so that somebody can pray for each one during the week, and he has written her son's name in it, on the same line, in the same place, every Tuesday since the boy was twenty-three. He is thirty-four now. He is kind to her. He rings on Sundays, fixes her guttering, brings the grandchildren, and does not believe a word of any of it, and says so gently, and changes the subject.

So it comes round to her, and she says what she says. And my son, please. Just that. She stopped adding details years ago because the details do not change. And tonight, for the first time, she watches the leader's pen. It does not move. He nods, warmly, and looks to the next person. He is not being unkind. Her son's name is already on the line; he does not need to write it again. But she saw the pen not move, and something in her that has been holding on with both hands for eleven years feels the floor go.

Because here is what she has come to believe, and she has never told anyone: that his soul is up on her shoulders. That the Tuesdays are what hold it there. That if she misses one, if she is ill or away or simply too tired, something in him will slip a little further down, and it will be on her. She has not missed a Tuesday in eleven years. She has prayed on holidays in hotel bathrooms and with a temperature of a hundred and two. And she has stopped, at some point she cannot name, expecting anything, and started simply holding him up, because somebody has to and it turned out to be her.

You know that chair. You know the name that comes out of your mouth in the same four words it has come out in for years, and the private arithmetic underneath it: that their soul is resting on your consistency, that the praying is what keeps them from falling, and that eleven years of nothing means either the praying was not good enough or God is not listening, and you cannot bear either. And you know the pen not moving, whatever that was for you: the moment the room stopped counting your person as news.

Whose soul is it

Let me open the ledger on this, because there is a line in Scripture that settles ownership, and I read Scripture the way an auditor reads a deed: whose name is on it.

Behold, all souls are mine; the soul of the father as well as the soul of the son is mine.Ezekiel 18:4

Read it slowly. All souls are mine. Not the ones who believe. All. The soul of the father as well as the soul of the son. God said that through a prophet to a people arguing about whose fault whose condition was, and He cut through the argument with a title deed. The soul is His. Every one. Which means the soul carried up the stairs every Tuesday for eleven years was never on your books. It is on His. It was on His before the boy was a boy. You have a God who owns your son's soul outright, and He has never once transferred the deed to you. That is written, and it is His Spirit who takes a line from Ezekiel and sets it down under a woman in a plastic chair so that she can finally put down what she was never asked to lift.

I want you to feel the weight coming off before I say anything else, because it has been carried so long it got mistaken for love. It is not love. Love is what has kept you in the chair. The weight is a lie that attached itself to the love, and the lie says: if you stop, he falls. He does not fall. He is held by the same hand that has held every soul that ever was, and your Tuesdays, precious as they are to God, are not the hand.

What the praying was, and what it never was

Now the weight, named plainly, because it has been carried under the wrong name.

Somewhere below words sits the belief that eleven years of nothing is a verdict on your praying. That if you had prayed better, or longer, or with more of whatever the people in the front rows seem to have, the pen would have had something new to write. Hear me on this, as a steward who has read a great many accounts: there is no column in heaven's books for prayer quality. Jesus said that no one comes to Him unless the Father draws them (John 6:44). Drawing is the Father's verb. It is not yours and it was never handed to you, and no amount of extra Tuesdays could have taken it over, because it is not the kind of work a mother can do for a son. Nobody's soul was ever converted by the sufficiency of somebody else's intercession, or Paul would have prayed his kinsmen in and saved himself the anguish of Romans 9.

So what was the praying? It was standing. It was what Samuel meant when he told a people who had wronged him, far be it from me that I should sin against the Lord by ceasing to pray for you (1 Samuel 12:23). Not by ceasing to convert you. By ceasing to pray. Standing for somebody is a real work and God counts it. It is simply not the work of carrying their soul, and the difference between the two is the difference between a woman who can pray for thirty more years and a woman who is going to break.

You are a stander and not a carrier, and you were made a stander by the One who does the carrying. Scripture never once tells an intercessor that the outcome is on them; it tells them to keep standing, and it is the Holy Spirit, Paul says, who takes our weak prayers, the ones that have run out of words, and carries them Himself, with groanings too deep for words (Romans 8:26). Do you see who is doing the lifting? Not you. He interceded for your son on the Tuesdays the prayers came easily and the Tuesdays that were only holding on, and He is interceding now.

The blessing and the appeal

Here is a thing about eleven years of the same four words. Somewhere along the way, please stopped being a prayer and became a plea, and a plea is what a person makes when the outcome seems to depend on how hard they ask. It bends the shoulders. And it is not how the priests of Israel were told to speak over the people.

They were given a blessing to say. The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace (Numbers 6:24-26). Read the grammar. It is not asking God to do something He is reluctant about. It is speaking what God has already said He wants over the person's head, in His name, and leaving the doing to Him. A blessing does not carry. It hands over. And you can say a blessing over a son who does not believe a word of it, because a blessing does not command his will; it commends him to the One whose will is good.

You have been given a blessing to speak over your son, in place of a plea, and it was written down for you long before either of you was born. God told Aaron to put His name on the people that way, and He said I will bless them, and it is His Spirit who makes a three thousand year old blessing land on one thirty-four year old man's head tonight, whether or not the man knows it is landing. What God does with it is His. Your part is to say it and let go of the end of it.