Trying To Pray It Into Shape

She has fasted three days a week since May and she has the notes to prove it.

There is a book. It has the dates in it, and what she asked for, and the verses she stood on, and there is a column down the right hand side where she marks whether she prayed through or whether she stopped early, and there are more ticks than crosses and she is not proud of counting.

She prays out loud. She walks the room. She has a way of praying that a great many people in that church would tell you has moved things, and they would not be inventing it.

Four months.

And the thing she has been contending for is not a bad thing and it is not a selfish thing, and it has not moved, and what has happened instead is that she has moved. Down. She is worn to a thread. She sleeps badly and gets up to pray about sleeping badly. Her sister said something to her in July about her face and she cannot get it out of her head.

Here is what she will not say out loud in that building, and what she said to the steering wheel on Sunday.

She said: I do not think I can pray any harder than this.

And underneath that, a thing she has not said anywhere at all, which is the actual subject of this article: I think if I pray hard enough it will take a shape.

She would deny that if you put it to her plainly. She knows the doctrine. She would tell you, correctly and at length, that God is not moved by volume and that nobody earns anything and that Jesus warned against thinking we are heard for our much speaking.

She knows all of it. And she has been out on that floor since May trying to force something formless into a form with her own voice.

You know that book. Yours may have no book in it at all. But you know what it is to turn prayer into labor, quietly, over months, and to be worn down by a thing that was supposed to be where you went to rest.

The deep was not doing the work

Let me name the pit before the verse, because if this lands as a criticism of fasting it will be both wrong and cruel.

Nothing about the fasting is wrong and nothing about the volume is wrong. There is a place for both and you know that place better than most people. The pit is that somewhere in May the direction reversed, and prayer stopped being where you receive and became where you produce, and a woman who produces for four months without receiving anything is a woman worn to a thread, and the wearing is not evidence that she needs to try harder.

Here is the second sentence in the Bible.

The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.Genesis 1:2

Look at who is doing what.

The deep is formless. It is dark. It is void. It is not straining, not contending, not producing, not marking a column down the right hand side. It is lying there with no shape in it whatsoever.

And over it, the Spirit of God, and the word for what He is doing is a brooding word. Deuteronomy 32:11 uses the same picture for an eagle spreading herself over her nest and her young.

Here I teach one thing about the Hebrew and I draw the line in the same breath, because on this ground the two never travel apart. The word for Spirit is ruach, which also means breath and wind, and in Hebrew it is a feminine word, so the verb beside it takes a feminine form, the way it would beside the word for a hand or a city. Grammar is not sex. God is neither male nor female; Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, and Scripture reaches for a father's traits and a mother's both when it tells you who He is, and the bird over the nest is one of the motherly pictures and He chose it Himself. It does not make the Spirit a woman and it does not make God a goddess. It makes the picture true, and true is what a worn out woman needs at this hour.

Take that at the steering wheel, and know it is not my permission, it is the second sentence of the Bible. You are being brooded over, in the state you are in, and the work over your deep is not yours. Genesis 1:2 has the Spirit doing the hovering and the water doing nothing at all, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been over your situation since before May and did not start when you did.

And the next verse settles it.

And God said, Let there be light.Genesis 1:3

The shape came by a word from above the water. Not by the deep contending. Not by the deep persisting. There is nothing in that chapter where the water is commended for effort or blamed for silence, because the water was never the actor.

Four months of volume has not been what was holding this together, and stopping is not surrender. I am not putting down one hour of it; God is not indifferent to a woman who has stood on His word since May. But the producing was never the arrangement, and it is the Holy Spirit who broods, and He has been at it in every hour you were on that floor exhausting yourself.