The List of What She Should Have Known

Ten past six, the kitchen light on and the window still dark blue, and Alma is standing at the counter with the coffee going, practicing.

She says it out loud. "Lord, thank You for this day." Then she stops, because her voice sounds like somebody else's voice, and because that was terrible, and because she is sixty eight years old and standing in her own kitchen rehearsing eight words like a girl in a school play.

The prayer group is Thursday. Six women, a living room, a plate of something, and it goes around the circle. Alma has been eleven times and she has said amen eleven times and nothing else, and every one of those women has been kind about it, which somehow makes it worse. Last Thursday Bernice, who is eighty one and prays like turning on a faucet, put a hand on her arm at the door and said, next week, you say one. Just one. And Alma said all right.

On the counter beside her is a spiral notebook, and in the front of it, on the inside cover in pencil, is the list.

She started it about two years ago and has never shown it to anybody. It is not a prayer list. It is the other thing. Where Habakkuk is without using the contents page. What justification means, actually, not roughly. Why there are two books of Samuel. Whether it is bad that I have never once heard God say anything. What people mean when they say the Lord laid it on their heart. How to pray out loud without my voice doing that.

Eleven items now, added about once a month, always in pencil, always small, in the handwriting she used to use for the grocery list.

And under the whole thing, unwritten, is the sentence the list is really made of, which is that everybody in that living room got forty years of Thursdays that Alma did not get, and there is no way to go back and get them, and she is starting at the beginning at an age when the other women were already teaching.

She pours the coffee. She says it again, out loud, to the window. "Lord, thank You for this day." It is still not good. She says it a third time anyway.

You know the notebook. Yours might be a Bible you cannot find your way around, a room full of people who grew up in it, a stretch of decades behind you that you can count and cannot get back. And you know the list, the one in pencil, of everything you believe you ought to have known by now.

The latter end, and what it did not undo

The verse people hand a late arrival is the last chapter of Job, and it is usually handed over too fast, so let me slow it down and read the part that gets left out.

So the LORD blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning.Job 42:12

That is true and it is not a formula, and I am not going to hand it to anybody as one. Nothing in that sentence promises that a particular woman's remaining years will be unusually productive to make up for the earlier ones. God is not running a compensation scheme, and a person who has been sold one and does not get it has been badly used.

What the verse establishes is sturdier than a promise about output. It establishes that God is at work in latter ends, that the last chapter of a life is not an epilogue He has lost interest in, and that a beginning which arrives late is still a beginning He starts.

You are inside a season Scripture treats as a real one and not as leftovers. Job 42:12 puts God actively at work at the end of a man's life, and it is His Spirit who does that work now as He did it then, without a note anywhere in the record about the hour a person got there.

And here is the honesty in that chapter that almost nobody quotes. Job's ten children died in chapter one. In chapter forty-two he is given seven sons and three daughters. He is not given the first ten back. Scripture does not say the new children canceled the old ones, and Job did not stop being a man who had buried ten.

You were never asked to pretend the years behind you cost nothing, and the word does not pretend it either. The book of Job holds a blessed latter end and an unhealed grief in the same chapter without flinching, and the Spirit who preserved both halves of that chapter is not asking anybody to put down the second one to be allowed the first.

Three years in, and still asking

Now the thing that would take the pencil out of a woman's hand, if anybody ever showed it to her.

The eleven men who had been with Jesus every day for three years are in a room with Him on the last night. They have seen the loaves, the storm, the blind man, Lazarus. If ever a group of people should have had the basics down, it is these eleven, at this table, at this hour.

Thomas says: Lord, we know not whither thou goest, and how can we know the way? (John 14:5). Philip says, four verses later: Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us (John 14:8).

Read those again. Those are items one and two on somebody's list in pencil. Where are you going. What is God like. Asked out loud, by insiders, three years in, on the last night, in front of everybody.

You are asking exactly the questions the men closest to Him were still asking, and He did not put a single one of them out of the room for it. John 14 records the questions and records the answers, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps that scene from being a scene about their failure, because it is plainly not written as one.

Look at what Jesus does. He answers Thomas with one of the most quoted sentences He ever spoke, and answers Philip by telling him that whoever has seen Him has seen the Father. He does not say you should know this by now. He answers.

You have a Teacher whose recorded habit is to answer the beginner's question rather than to date-stamp it. It is written in John 14 in that order, question and answer, twice in nine verses, and His Spirit is the one who takes that record and makes it a fact about a kitchen at ten past six in the morning.

The one who prays when the words run out

There is a sentence in Romans that was written for a woman rehearsing eight words at a counter, and she has probably never had it pointed at her.

Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.Romans 8:26

We know not what we should pray for as we ought. Paul wrote that about himself and everybody he was writing to, not about beginners. Not knowing how to pray is not the mark of the latecomer. It is the standing condition of everybody in that living room on Thursday, including Bernice, who prays like a faucet and would tell you so herself.

You have Somebody praying underneath your prayer, and He was doing it before you ever said a word out loud. Romans 8:26 says the Spirit makes intercession for us, and the same Spirit is the one carrying the eight words at the counter, which means the shaking in the voice is not a defect in the transmission.

And notice the direction of the help. Paul does not say the Spirit corrects our prayers. He says He helps our weakness and intercedes where the words run out entirely, in groanings with no words in them at all. No prayer in that verse is too poorly worded to arrive.

You are not the one carrying this across, and the word puts the carrying on Him in the very verse where it admits nobody knows how to pray properly. Romans 8:26 names the weakness and the Helper in one line, and the Holy Spirit does the interceding whether a person has been at it four decades or eleven Thursdays.