Standing In for Someone Who Cannot

He has prayed the same prayer so many times it has gone smooth, like a stair tread worn in the middle. He does not choose the words anymore. They arrive in order, the same order, and he says them into the dark ceiling of the same room and then lies there listening to the house.

Tonight he could not do it. He got about four words in and stopped, and got up, and came down to the kitchen without turning the big light on, and sat at the table in the chair he always sits in. Across from him is the chair his son used to sit in, and it is exactly where it has been for nine years, because moving it was never something anybody in this house discussed and never something anybody could do.

His son is somewhere in the city. He is alive, as far as anybody knows. He does not want to be found this week, and he is not praying for himself, and has not for a long time, and would laugh at the suggestion in a way that would take his father a fortnight to recover from.

So the man sits with his hands flat on the table at midnight and thinks the thought he has never said to another human being, which is: I do not know if any of this has done anything at all.

Now I am going to stop describing him, because you have your own chair and your own name and I would rather sit with you than tell you about somebody else.

Yours might be a son. It might be a mother in a bed who does not know the year. A brother who cannot form the sentence. A daughter who has gone quiet, a husband who used to pray and stopped, a friend too far under to lift their own head.

You have been standing in for them, quietly, for a long time. And I want to ask you something, because I think you have been asking yourself the wrong question at midnight.

You cannot walk into that house for them. You know that. So what is it you have actually been keeping alive all these years?

Two things you can do, and one you cannot

In an old house there is a small flame kept burning in the plant room that heats everything. It does nothing on its own. It warms no rooms, it is not the heat, and it will not fill a bath. But when the house calls for heat, the heat is there in seconds, because somebody kept a small thing alive through a cold season when the house was empty and no one could see the point.

That is what you have been doing. And nobody has told you it counts, so let me be the one who does.

You cannot walk through that door for them. You cannot make the choice on their behalf, you cannot want it for them hard enough to make it happen, and you cannot bypass their will, and I am not going to tell you that you can, because that would be a lie and it would set you up for a heartbreak you have already had enough of. What I can hand you instead is written, and it is not mine to soften: God takes the contending on Himself. His Spirit has been in that kitchen every night the big light stayed off.

But you have kept the flame alive. You have held the house ready. And when it is time, it is ready because of you, and you will never be able to prove that to anybody and it is true anyway.

Now let me name the cost, because I do not think anyone has named it to your face.

You have grieved somebody who has not died, which is a grief with no service, no casseroles, no anniversary, and no permission. People stopped asking about them years ago, and when they do ask, you can hear them deciding how much they actually want to know.

You have carried a suspicion that you caused it. Every parent I have ever sat with carries a private list of the three or four moments they believe are the reason. You have reviewed yours more times than you would admit, at hours when nobody should be reviewing anything. That list is not the word of God about you, and the Holy Spirit has never once read it back to you at midnight. Accusation does that. He does not.

You have been asked to explain them at family gatherings. You have got good at a sentence that closes the subject without lying.

And somewhere in the last few years you started praying less, not because you believe less, but because hoping every morning and going to bed with nothing has a cost, and you were running low, and pulling back was how you stayed upright.

None of that is faithlessness. That is a person who has been standing at a post for years without relief, and it is one of the most honorable things I know of, and heaven has not missed a single night of it. The Spirit has kept that record, and what is written next is what He has been saying over your family the whole time.

For I will contend with him that contendeth with thee, and I will save thy children.Isaiah 49:25

Read who is doing the contending. Not you. You have been trying to fight something you cannot see, with weapons you do not have, in a battle you were never issued for. God says He takes that on Himself.

And notice what He contends with. Not your child. Never your child. The thing that has hold of them. The lie, the shame, the addiction, the fog, the years of persuasion that told them the door was closed. God stands against that, and He is not neutral about it, and He has never once been indifferent to the one you are carrying. The Spirit who carries Isaiah 49:25 did not wait for your family to improve before He took the case.

I want to say two more things and then we will go and stand at the chair.

The first. Praying for somebody who cannot pray for themselves is not a lesser kind of prayer. Four men once took a roof apart because their friend could not walk to Jesus by himself, and Jesus looked at the faith of the friends and acted. The man on the mat did not argue his own case. He was carried, and he was carried by people who broke a roof to do it, and heaven had no problem with that at all.

The second. You are not holding the outcome, and you were never meant to. They are a person with a will of their own and God honors that, and if the day comes when they turn, it is their day, their choice, their own two feet. Your part is not to produce them. Your part is to stand in, and keep the flame, and refuse to agree with the worst report about them. That is enough. It has always been enough. Scripture puts the saving in God's hands and the standing in yours. The same Spirit who raised Christ has been carrying the end of it you were never issued for.