The Same Prayer Five Years Later

He is up before anybody, which is the only reason this happens at all.

The kitchen is cold at the floor and warm at the ceiling and the furnace has just kicked on. There is coffee, and there is the dog, who has decided the tile by the stove is hers. Out the window over the sink the grass has that white on it that burns off by eight.

On the table is a stack of composition notebooks with a rubber band around them, because he came down looking for the name of the man who repaired the well pump. Ten of them. He has kept one a year since he was thirty six, half prayer and half farm ledger and half the sort of thing a man will only say in pencil, which is three halves, which is about right for a notebook.

He finds the pump. He also finds, because the notebook falls open where a spine has been broken, the second week of October five years ago.

And there, in his own handwriting, slanting the way it does when he writes fast, is the prayer.

Not a similar prayer. The prayer. The same four lines about the same thing, in the same order, with the same word in the middle he always reaches for and always thinks is not quite the word. He set the old one down beside the new one, open to this week, and there it was in both, five years apart, near enough word for word that a stranger would think he had copied it.

He is not devastated. That is not what this is. He pours the rest of the coffee and does a quiet piece of arithmetic that no man wants to do at six in the morning.

Five years. Two of the kids grown and gone in that time. A roof. A funeral. And the same four lines, still open, still unanswered, and a man who was quite certain, at forty two, that he would be further along by now.

The dog gets up and puts her head on his knee. Out the window, the light comes over the ridge and hits the frost, and the whole field turns gold for about four minutes the way it does.

You know the notebook. Yours might be an app, or a shoebox, or a Bible with the margins full, or nothing written down at all, just the certainty that you are asking for the same thing you were asking for when your children were small. And you know the arithmetic that runs while the coffee cools.

What a tree does in the years nobody photographs

I want to put a psalm on the table between those two notebooks.

The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree: he shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon. Those that be planted in the house of the LORD shall flourish in the courts of our God. They shall still bring forth fruit in old age; they shall be fat and flourishing.Psalm 92:12-14

Here is what nobody tells you about a cedar. Photograph one in October and photograph it again five Octobers later, from the same fence post, and a man looking at the two pictures would swear nothing had happened. Same shape. Same lean. The tree does not perform.

The growth is in the rings, the rings are on the inside, and the only way to read them from outside is to cut the tree down.

That is the arrangement God chose for the thing He chose to compare His people to. He did not compare the righteous to a firework. He compared them to a cedar, whose entire testimony is interior and slow and reads, from outside, exactly like nothing.

You are growing on a timetable that was never designed to be visible from the fence post, and the psalm is where I get that and not from my own comfort. Psalm 92 puts the flourishing inside a tree and puts the fruit in old age, and it is His Spirit, not the man's own inspection, who does the work down where the rings are being laid.

The prayer that has not changed may be the prayer that was kept

Now the sharper one.

The arithmetic in that kitchen goes like this: if I am still asking, nothing has moved. That looks like humility. It is actually a rule the man made up, and Scripture does not keep it.

Open the Psalms and count how often the same man asks the same thing in the same words. Psalm 13 asks how long four times in two verses. Whole psalms are one line said again. The book God gave His people to pray out of is full of repetition, and not one line of it is presented as a defect in the person praying.

How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me?Psalm 13:1

That was written down, kept, set to music, and handed to the whole congregation to sing. God did not edit the repetition out of His own hymnbook, which tells you what He thinks of a man who comes back with the same four lines.

You have been coming back to the same door for five years, and that is faithfulness wearing work clothes, not evidence of a stall. It is written into the Psalms that a man may ask the same thing over and over and still be praying in the Spirit of God, and the Spirit Himself is described as making intercession for us with groanings that cannot be put into words at all.

And here is the other half, which I would say slowly. The prayer being unchanged is not the same as the man being unchanged. A man reads his own handwriting and thinks he is looking at a photograph of himself. He is looking at four lines. The person who wrote them has been carried through two children leaving, a roof and a funeral since, and none of that is in the sentence.

You are not the same man who wrote it, and the reason has nothing to do with what the sentence looks like. Psalm 92 has the planted one flourishing in the courts of God across seasons nobody photographs, and it is the Spirit who has been at the work through every one of those years, whether or not the wording moved.

Whose verbs the growing belongs to

Now the thing I keep coming back to, because it is my own life verse and I have never gotten past it.

Read the twenty third psalm and notice who is doing the acting. He maketh me to lie down. He leadeth me. He restoreth my soul. He prepareth a table. He anointeth. Nearly every verb in the psalm belongs to the Shepherd, and the sheep's contribution is to be there.

A sheep does not grow by trying to grow. It has no mechanism for that. It grows because somebody who knows the country walks it to grass and water it could not find on its own, and then it eats, and then, over a long time, without noticing, it is a different animal than it was.

That is the whole reason this category is called fed and growing rather than growing. Fed comes first, and fed is something done to you.

You are being pastured by somebody who knows the ground, and the psalm hands nearly every verb in it to Him. Psalm 23 has the Shepherd making, leading, restoring and preparing, and it is the Spirit who does that leading in a life now, which means the growing was never a performance a man was failing to deliver.

Now hear the other side, because I am not building a hammock here. There is real work in a life with God. Get up, read, forgive the man, tell the truth, go to the meeting, be kind to your wife before you have had coffee. None of that is optional and I would not respect you enough to say it was.

But working a field is a different job from digging up the crop to see how it is doing. One is farming. The other is an inspection, and I have never seen an inspection make anything grow.