The Prayer My Grandmother Handed Me

She prayed it for forty years. He has prayed it for twelve.

The same thing, about the same person, in the same kitchen, and the only difference is that she said it in a low voice with her hands in the sink and he says it at the stove with the radio off.

He remembers her praying it when he was seven. He did not know then that it was a prayer. He thought she was talking to the window.

At her funeral he found himself furious about it, and could not have told anybody why, and it took him a year to work out what the anger was made of. It was this: forty years, and nothing. She went into the ground with it unanswered, and the family called her a woman of faith, and nobody said the other part out loud.

So he picked it up. That is what you do in his family. And now it has been twelve years in his own mouth, and he is beginning to understand the low voice at the sink, because a prayer you have said for a long time gets quieter, and it is not because you believe it less.

If you are carrying somebody else's prayer along with your own, sit down at this table. I am not going to explain your family's silence to you.

I will not give you a reason for fifty two years

Let us take this off the table before we eat, because a man braced for a diagnosis does not taste anything.

I do not know why it has been quiet. No honest person does, and anybody who tells you what your grandmother's forty years meant is guessing on somebody's grave.

I am not going to say it was a generational thing that had to be broken. I am not going to say she prayed with the wrong words, or that faith skipped a step somewhere, or that God was waiting for the right person in the line to ask, or that the delay is a lesson being taught to your family. Every one of those hands the silence back as somebody's fault, and it usually gets handed to the dead, who cannot answer for themselves.

You are not standing under a family verdict. Fifty two years of quiet is not God refusing to look at this house, and it never was. That is not my opinion. The written word says the LORD is good to all: and his tender mercies are over all his works (Psalm 145:9), all being the widest word in the sentence and no household exempted from it, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that hold in a kitchen with the radio off.

The book keeps a whole people asking

Here is what changed this for me, and it is not a method for getting an answer at last.

Awake, why sleepest thou, O Lord? arise, cast us not off for ever.Psalm 44:23

That is not one man in a bad week. That is a congregation, a whole people, saying it together, out loud, in the place where they worshipped. Read the psalm around it. They insist they have not forgotten Him and they cannot understand the quiet and they say so in company without lowering their voices.

Nobody edited that out of the songbook to protect God's reputation. It went in as it was, and it was sung, and it has been sung by families ever since.

You have not fallen out of the company of praying people, and neither did she. What went on in this kitchen for fifty two years is prayer, in the same book, under the same name, and the Word never once graded it on the reply. That is written down and kept on purpose, and His Spirit is the one who makes it land in a man at a stove who has begun to wonder whether his family got something wrong.

An inheritance is not a debt

Something has to be said about the thing in your hands, because it has quietly changed shape.

You picked up her prayer as love. Somewhere in the twelve years it started to feel like an account she left open that you are expected to settle, and that is a different weight entirely, and it is not the one she handed you.

You are not paying off her forty years. What you carry is a family's love with words on it, and love was never a debt collector at this table. Scripture puts it plainly, that we cast all our care upon Him, for he careth for us (1 Peter 5:7), and the caring stayed His through both generations, and it is the Holy Spirit, and He is the one who has been carrying the weight of this the whole time rather than the two of you taking turns under it.

And if this has cost more than anybody in the family knows, if sleep has gone, if the evenings have started to frighten, please tell 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.