Still Asking Out Of Habit

Her mouth still does it. That is the only way she can describe it accurately.

The thing comes round in her praying, the way it has for years, and the request goes up, and she is aware while it is happening that she stopped believing in it some time ago and that this is now a movement of the lips rather than an act of hope.

She has tried stopping. Twice. Both times she found she could not, and not for a noble reason: it turns out that removing a fixed item from a habit that has run for six years is harder than keeping it.

So she is a woman asking for something she does not think will happen, in the full knowledge that she does not think it, addressed to somebody who knows she does not think it.

She has decided this is probably the emptiest thing she does, and she has never said so, and she suspects that saying so would make it worse.

If your asking has outlived your believing, come and sit down at this table. Nothing about your habit is going to be called dead here.

A habit that will not be dropped is worth looking at

Let us look at the thing she cannot do, because it is more interesting than the thing she cannot feel.

Twice she has tried to stop, and twice something in her refused. That is not nothing. Whatever it is that keeps a request in a person's mouth after the hope has gone, it is not hope, and it is not pretense either, and it deserves a better name than emptiness.

Most likely it is love. Love outlasts expectation routinely, and the asking has simply carried on doing what love does after the forecast changed.

You are not doing an empty thing. Nothing about a request with no expectation behind it has ever been received as nothing, and God has never once needed your forecast to match His. I am not saying it to be kind. The written word says the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought (Romans 8:26), which puts the weakness of a request inside the ordinary Christian life, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries what a person can no longer believe.

The sister who said the practical thing

Here is what steadied me, and it is not a way of getting the belief back.

They are at a tomb, four days in, and Jesus says take away the stone, and the sister of the dead man answers Him with the actual state of affairs.

Martha, the sister of him that was dead, saith unto him, Lord, by this time he stinketh: for he hath been dead four days.John 11:39

That is not faithlessness. That is a woman who has been in the house with the reality for four days, saying the practical thing out loud in front of everybody, at the exact moment when a more presentable person would have said something else.

And she is not rebuked and she is not removed from the scene. She is standing right there for what happens next, and the record keeps her sentence in place without softening it.

You have said what Martha said, and the Word keeps her sentence beside the moment rather than editing it out. That is written down as she said it, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes it land in a woman whose mouth asks for something her mind has closed.

Nothing is being predicted about your request

Something has to be said very plainly, because this is where the promise usually shows up.

I do not know whether what you are asking for happens. Nobody does. This page will not tell you that it is close, or that the years of asking are about to be answered, because I have not been given that, and a promise invented at a table like this is a debt you would pay every morning it did not come.

You have God's disposition toward you settled, and nothing about the outcome is being announced from this page. Scripture says the Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering (2 Peter 3:9), which describes His character and never a timetable, and the Holy Spirit, not the wording, is the one who has carried six years of asking, believed and unbelieved alike, on identical terms.

And if this has cost more than anybody at this table knows, if sleep has gone, if the evenings have started to frighten, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.