Somebody Else's Prayer

Her grandmother prayed for her by name every day for thirty-one years and everybody in that family knows it.

It is part of the folklore. There is a chair. There is a list she kept in the back of something, with all their names on it and some of them crossed through and written again in different pen. Her grandmother told her, more than once and without any pressure, that she had asked for this one specifically since before she could walk.

She died four years ago and it was said at the funeral, and people cried, and it was the right thing to say.

And ever since, this has been sitting in her.

She thinks she might only be here because of that.

Not in a warm way. In a specific and slightly cold way that she has never told anybody: that if you removed the grandmother, the chair, the list and the thirty-one years, there might be nothing underneath. That she is running on somebody else's belief the way a house runs on a generator, and that one day the fuel is going to be gone and everybody will find out including her.

She is twenty-nine. She has been at this for as long as she can remember and she is good at it and people ask her things.

And she has never once been able to answer the question of whether any of it is actually hers.

Named, and then handed over

Let me start by taking a false idea off you, because you have been carrying it and it is not from God.

You have been treating your grandmother's prayers as a competing explanation. Either it is really yours, or it is her thirty-one years, and if it is her thirty-one years then yours is a copy.

That is not how any of this works, and nobody would apply it anywhere else. Nobody says a person cannot really play the piano because their mother paid for the lessons.

Now hear this and take it as settled rather than as comfort: an inherited beginning is a real beginning, and there is a sentence in that letter that names two women and then hands the thing to the man reading it. That is not my kindness talking, it is what stands written in the first chapter of Second Timothy, and the same Holy Spirit who was in that chair for thirty-one years is with you at the kitchen window.

Read it and watch both halves of the sentence, because most people only quote the first.

I am reminded of your sincere faith, which first lived in your grandmother Lois and in your mother Eunice and, I am persuaded, now lives in you also.2 Timothy 1:5

Which first lived in your grandmother Lois and in your mother Eunice.

That is the inheritance, named out loud, with the women given their names rather than being politely folded into background.

And then: now lives in you also.

The sentence does not treat the second half as weaker for having a first half. It is written the other way round: the history is the reason for confidence, not the reason for suspicion.

So take this now rather than after you find some independent proof of yourself: what is in you is genuinely yours, because the written word names the grandmother and the mother and then says plainly that it lives in him now, and the Spirit of God is the one who has been answering a woman in a chair for thirty-one years by dealing with you directly.

And the guard, because there is a way to hear this that would flatten something true.

Nothing here says her prayers did not matter or that you would have got here anyway. That is not knowable and I am not going to pretend it is. She prayed and here you are, and the two things are related, and treating that as a coincidence would be its own kind of dishonesty.

What is written simply refuses to make an inheritance into a debt, and the Holy Spirit does not run anybody on borrowed fuel.