The Woman Who Prays for Everybody

If somebody is in trouble in that church, she gets asked for by name.

That is not vanity. It is a fact about how that building works, and everybody would confirm it. There is a woman there who prays, and when a family is going through something the pastor's wife rings her, and when somebody collapses at a service she is in the aisle before the ushers, and when the prayer meeting goes round the room she prays for people she has never met by name, correctly, from memory, in detail.

She is not performing. That has to be said before anything else, because from the outside a woman like that can look like a performance and she is not one. She keeps a list. She actually gets up. She has prayed for a man in that congregation every day for eleven years and he does not know it and never will.

She is sixty-one.

And on Wednesday, at the end of a meeting, she was collecting her bag and one of the younger women said something entirely ordinary. She said: is there anything we can pray for you about.

And there was a pause. And she said: oh, I am fine, love, thank you.

Which is what she always says, and it is only in the car that she registered that it is what she always says, and that the pause before it was about four seconds long, and that in those four seconds she went through her own life looking for something she could offer to a room and did not find one thing she was willing to hand over.

Not because there is nothing. There is quite a lot.

And driving home she got as far as the thing she has been circling since, which is this: praying out loud for a room is a way of being at the very front of it without ever being in it.

Everybody hears her voice. Everybody knows her name. She is the most spiritually visible person in that building, and she is holding, at this moment, eleven things that nobody in it has ever heard about.

And you know that meeting. You would rather be looked at than known, and you have found the most respectable and most spiritual way available to do it, and it genuinely helps people, which is why nobody has ever questioned it including you.

So take this in before we go a step further. You are not performing and eleven years of that praying was not a cover. Psalm 139:1 says O LORD, thou hast searched me, and known me, and it is finished and it is thorough, and the Holy Spirit is in this car with you and is not embarrassed to be here.

Boldly means out loud

There is an invitation in Hebrews that everybody has heard, and the word underneath boldly is not the word people assume.

Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.Hebrews 4:16

The Greek behind boldly is a word about speech. Its root is about saying everything, speaking freely, the frankness of somebody who has the standing to say what they actually think rather than what is appropriate. It is the word for a citizen speaking in an assembly rather than a subject choosing his words.

So the invitation is not primarily about courage. It is about outspokenness. Come and say it plainly.

And then look at what is on offer at the other end. That we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.

Obtain mercy. For the one coming. Not for the people on the list. There is nothing in that verse about interceding, and it is not a verse about carrying somebody else in; it is about a person walking up and getting something for themselves, out loud, in plain terms, because they have the standing to.

You are invited to come and say it plainly and to get something for yourself. The written word uses a speech word rather than a courage word and puts the mercy on the one arriving, which means the throne has been open to you personally for eleven years while you have been bringing everybody else's names to it; and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into a car after a Wednesday meeting.

And notice the verse before it, because it is the reason this one is allowed to be so blunt. We have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities. The frankness is not permitted because the person coming is impressive. It is permitted because the one being come to has been through it.

Intercession is a real gift and it is also a place to stand

I want to be exact, because two things are true here and dropping either one would be unfair to you.

The first is that the gift is real. You are not using prayer as a hiding place in the sense of doing something false. The man you have prayed for daily for eleven years has been genuinely prayed for. That is not a technique and it is not a shield, it is the thing itself, and there is a great deal of it in that building because of you.

The second is that the position it puts you in is at the front and facing outward. And a person at the front facing outward is never in anybody's line of sight in the way that a person in a chair is. Every hand goes on somebody else's shoulder. Every name said out loud is somebody else's name. Nobody in eleven years has had cause to wonder about you, because you are so obviously the one doing the carrying.

Both of those are true at once, and the second one is not a criticism of the first.

You were not hiding, and the position you occupy has no line of sight onto you. Galatians 6:2 says bear ye one another's burdens, and one another is reciprocal in that sentence and was written to a whole church rather than to the strong ones in it; His Spirit is the one who carries what gets brought, and He is not measuring your intercession.

And here is the second half, and I want to be careful with it, because this is the last thing this site says to anybody and the temptation would be to tell you what to say and to whom.

I am not going to. Nothing on this page will tell you what to disclose, or that you should put your name on the list, or that it should be the younger woman who asked, or that it should be anybody at that church at all. You know that building better than any page could, and the choice of the thing and the person is yours entirely.

You are choosing both the what and the whom, and no page and no meeting gets a vote. Hebrews 4:15 says we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities, and it is a statement about His experience rather than an instruction about your disclosure; the same Spirit who had that written is the one who has been in every prayer meeting you have ever prayed in.

The four seconds

Here is the practical thing, and it is exactly as small as the moment that produced it.

Somebody asked you a real question on Wednesday and you had four seconds and you said I am fine, love, thank you, and that is what you have said every time for years.

You are going to be asked again. In that building, given who you are, probably within two weeks.

So decide now, in the car, in the daylight, what you will say. Not the whole of anything. One thing, current, true, small enough to hand over in a sentence, chosen in advance so that it does not have to be found in four seconds under pressure by a woman whose instinct, at speed, will always be to deflect.

That is the whole action. And when you say it, somebody will put a hand on your shoulder, and you will find out what eleven years of doing that for other people has actually been.

You have a sentence to prepare and two weeks to prepare it in, and it does not have to be the whole of anything. Scripture says come boldly, and boldly is a word about saying it out and saying it plainly; the Holy Spirit is the one who made the pause four seconds long instead of none.

So the hall is not a place where you hide. It is a room where a great deal of real prayer has been prayed by a woman who means it, and where nobody has ever put a hand on her shoulder, and where somebody is going to ask her again inside two weeks.

And one plain thing. If what you are holding is heavier than a page can carry, find a real person this week. If it has gone darker than tired, call or text 988 in the United States, at any hour.