The Woman Who Taught Her To Pray Is Gone

She was twenty-four and she prayed like somebody reading a card.

Correct. Reverent. Nothing wrong with a word of it and nothing in it either, and she knew that, and she had begun to think that whatever other people had was simply not something she was going to have.

Then she started going to a Thursday morning thing in a side room with about nine women in it, and one of them took her under.

That is the only phrase for it. There was no arrangement and nobody used the word mentor. She just ended up sitting next to her every Thursday for six years, and she heard her pray, week after week, and slowly the card went away and something else came.

She could not tell you exactly how it transferred. That is the nature of it. She just came out of those six years praying like a woman who expects to be heard.

And then last year everything about that woman came out.

She will not describe it. It is not hers to describe, and there were people damaged who are still working through it, and every word about it belongs to them and not to a page.

What she has now is a hole in the middle of her Thursday.

She still prays. Of course she prays. But it has gone back to the card. Not immediately; it happened over about four months, and she noticed it in the spring, and she can hear it now: correct, reverent, nothing wrong with a word of it and nothing in it.

Because every time she starts to go into it, the other way, the way she was actually taught, there is a small movement in her that pulls back, and the movement is faster than her thinking and it says something like: that is hers, and you know what she was.

Six years. Nine women. A side room with a radiator that clanked.

And she is back to reading a card at forty-one, and nobody knows.

And you have a way of doing something that you have quietly put down. You know exactly where you learned it, and you cannot pick it up without picking up the whole of them, so you have stopped.

The treasure and the jar are in the same sentence on purpose

There is a sentence Paul writes about how God does absolutely all of this, and it is not a consolation, it is a design statement.

But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us.2 Corinthians 4:7

Read the reason he gives, because it is the whole thing.

To show. The clay is not an unfortunate limitation God works around. It is the arrangement, deliberately chosen, so that when anything real happens nobody in the room can mistake where it came from.

Which means the fragility of a person carrying something true is not a scandal in the system. It is the system, and it always has been, and every single carrier of anything in Scripture has been clay all the way down.

You were handed something real out of a jar, and the jar was always going to be clay because God does it that way on purpose. It is written that we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us (2 Corinthians 4:7), and it is the Holy Spirit who was the surpassing power in that side room on all six years of Thursdays.

Now the movement that pulls you back, because that is the actual mechanism.

It is faster than your thinking and it says: that is hers.

It is not hers. That is the plain fact of it and it needs saying without any softening. Praying like a woman who expects to be heard is not her invention. It is all over the Psalms. It is Hannah, and it is Bartimaeus shouting over a crowd that told him to be quiet, and it is the friend at midnight in Luke eleven who keeps knocking, and Christ Himself told that one specifically so that people would pray like that.

She showed you something that was already in the book. She did not manufacture it and she did not own it.

You did not learn her way of praying, you learned the Bible's way of praying, from somebody who happened to be doing it in front of you. Scripture says let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace (Hebrews 4:16), and it is the Holy Spirit who gives that confidence, and He was giving it to a twenty-four year old with a card in her hand on Thursday mornings.

And the card, which is what you have gone back to.

There is nothing wrong with the card, in the sense that God hears it, and this page is not going to tell a woman her prayers are inadequate.

But you have named it yourself twice: nothing in it. And a woman of forty-one who has been taught something and put it down is not praying more humbly, she is praying with a hand tied behind her back for a reason that has nothing to do with God.

You are permitted the whole of what you were given, and holding back does not honor anybody. It is written that we do not have a high priest unable to sympathize with our weaknesses (Hebrews 4:15), and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a woman into that kind of praying, which is a thing He does and not a technique she inherited.

And the people who were damaged, who must be named here.

Nothing you do on a Thursday helps or hinders them. Your praying like a card does not repay them, and your praying with your whole chest does not cost them anything at all.

You are not holding something that was taken from somebody else. Scripture says the Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit (Psalm 34:18), and it is His Spirit who is with those particular people right now, which is a work of His that has never depended on your restraint.