The Years She Prayed

He found the notebook looking for the checkbook, which is the way most of it has gone since March.

Walt is seventy one. He is at the kitchen table at ten past six because he has never in his life been able to sleep past five thirty and now there is no reason to try. Her chair is across from him. He has not moved it. The percolator is going because she never wanted the other kind.

The notebook is a spiral one, the cheap kind from the drugstore, and it was in the drawer under the takeout menus. Her handwriting all the way through. Grocery lists, a phone number for the man who fixed the gutter, and then, a third of the way in, a page with a heading underlined twice.

Names. Two columns. Her sister. The neighbor boy who went to prison. And at the top of the left column, first name on the page, his own, with a date beside it in her small round hand from the spring their daughter was born.

Forty years.

Underneath she had written, in a different pen, at some point he cannot date: still asking.

Here is the part he cannot get around. He went to that church in June because the house on a Sunday morning was more than he could stand, and he sat in the back, and a man his own age gave him a ride home two weeks running, and somewhere in there the thing she had asked about for forty years came into him quietly and without any drama at all, and he knows perfectly well that it happened.

She died in March.

So he sits at this table at ten past six and does the arithmetic, and it always ends the same way. Forty years. Ninety days. She missed it by ninety days.

Underneath the arithmetic there is a worse sentence, which he has never said out loud to anybody: that he was the thing she carried. He could have ended it any time. He did not, and now she is gone and she does not know.

You know the arithmetic. Yours might have a different set of numbers in it, a mother, a brother, a friend who kept asking and then stopped calling. And you know the hour it runs, and how it always finishes with the same figure, and how there is nobody you can say it to without them trying to fix it.

He had hours, and nobody read him the arithmetic

Let me take you to the shortest conversation in the Gospels and ask you to count the sentences.

There is a man on a cross beside Jesus. We know almost nothing about him except what he says about himself, which is that he is getting what he deserves. He has, by every reckoning available, wasted the entire thing, and there are hours left, not years.

He says nine words: Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom.

And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, To day shalt thou be with me in paradise.Luke 23:43

Now notice everything that is not in that reply.

There is no accounting. No, if only you had come to Me at thirty. No reduced portion for a man arriving at the last hour of the last day of a wasted life. There is a word, and the word is today.

You are inside the same conversation that man had, and you were never handed a different set of terms. Luke 23:43 is the whole exchange and it fits in one line, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a sentence spoken between two crosses and sets it down in a kitchen at ten past six in the morning.

In my family's country a traveler who reaches the town at dusk is brought in and fed, and nobody at that table says, you should have started earlier. The house does not itemize the road. Whether he came from the next village or the far side of the desert, the bread is the same bread.

You have the word today out of the mouth of Jesus, and it is written down exactly that way for the man who arrived last. Luke 23:43 gives no timetable and no discount, and it is His Spirit, not the length of anybody's road, who makes that word land on the person reading it.

What Scripture says about the joy, and what it does not say

Now I am going to sit in the harder part with you, and I am not going to hurry it.

Forty years is forty years. Ninety days is ninety days. Nothing I say makes that into a smaller number, and I am not going to try, because a man who has just buried his wife can tell the difference between comfort and management within about four seconds.

Jesus stood outside a tomb where He knew perfectly well what He was about to do, and He wept anyway. John 11:35. He did not skip the grief on the grounds that the ending was already settled. That is the shortest verse in the Bible and it is there so that nobody would ever have to be brisk about this.

You are allowed to grieve forty years and to be glad about ninety days in the same hour, and you were never asked to pick one of them. It is written that Jesus wept at a grave He was about to open, John 11:35, and the Spirit who comforts does it by staying rather than by hurrying anybody along.

Now, what the record actually says. Not what people say at funerals.

There is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents. Luke 15:10. That is what the text gives us: the location of the joy. It does not hand us a diagram of what your wife knows this morning, and I will not invent one, because a comfort I made up would be worth nothing at six in the morning.

You have a Scripture that names where the joy is, and you have it without anybody needing to invent what it does not say. Luke 15:10 puts that joy in the presence of the angels of God, and the Spirit who carried that sentence into Luke's Gospel is not in the business of decorating it.

Her prayers were kept in a bowl

Here is the thing about those forty years that I want you to have, and it is not a consolation. It is a fact from the record.

And when he had taken the book, the four beasts and four and twenty elders fell down before the Lamb, having every one of them harps, and golden vials full of odours, which are the prayers of the saints.Revelation 5:8

Golden bowls, full, held before the throne, and John says plainly what is in them. The prayers of the saints. Not the answered ones. Not a summary. The prayers.

Think about what that means for a spiral notebook from a drugstore. Every morning she sat at that table and said your name. Forty years of it. And the picture Scripture gives is not of those words evaporating into a room where nobody was listening. It is of them being collected.

You have forty years of her asking kept rather than spent, and it is written that such prayers are held in golden bowls before the throne. Revelation 5:8 says the bowls are full and says what fills them, and the Spirit who showed John that room is the one who makes it more than an image to a man holding a cheap notebook.

And there is the widow in Luke 18, whom Jesus put into a parable for the express purpose of teaching men to pray and not to faint. He ends it by asking whether God will not avenge His own who cry to Him day and night. Luke 18:7. He treats long asking as the normal shape of faith. Not as a sign the answer is not coming.

You are looking at forty years of asking that Scripture treats as heard, and you were the subject of every one of them. Luke 18:7 says God hears His own who cry day and night, and it is the Spirit who keeps a person asking for four decades about somebody who has given them no encouragement at all.