The Card Was In The Other Room

Gideon Marsh had said the same evening prayer for sixty years, and he had never once needed the card to say it.

His mother wrote it out for him in 1966, on an index card, in blue ink, in the small upright hand she used for recipes. He was eleven. She told him it was a good prayer and that he could have it.

The card lived under the sugar bowl. The corners went soft and then furry. Around 1990 his wife laminated it without asking, which annoyed him for about a week and then quietly pleased him for thirty five years.

He said it over supper. He said it over four grandchildren on four separate first days of school. He said it at two bedsides in the hospital on Route 9, and the nurse in the doorway both times said afterward that he prayed beautifully.

And he did. That is not a trick in this story. Gideon Marsh prayed beautifully, and the reason he prayed beautifully is that his mother was a woman who knew how to say a thing.

What no one knew, because he had never told a living soul, was that Gideon could not start a sentence to God on his own. He had tried. Alone in the truck, in the field behind the shed, the mouth simply would not go. It was as though the beginning of prayer were a door he did not have the key to and had spent sixty years walking through on somebody else's.

October, twenty to eleven at night. The phone went off on the arm of his chair.

Dale. Forty four years old. On the shoulder of a road somewhere past the county line with a car that would not turn over and, from the sound of him, a life that would not either. He did not explain any of it. He said, "Dad. Pray."

The card was under the sugar bowl. The kitchen was eleven steps and one bad hip away and his son was on the line right now, breathing.

Nothing came.

Two seconds. Five. On a telephone, twelve seconds of nothing is close to unbearable, and Gideon sat in the dark with his mouth open and his mother's beautiful prayer sitting in the other room under a glass bowl of sugar.

Then he heard himself say, out loud:

"God. This is Gideon. That's my boy out there."

And he stopped, because he did not know what came after it.

So he said, "Please."

And on the other end of the line, on the gravel shoulder of a county road, Dale Marsh started to cry, which he had not done in front of his father in eleven years.

Four words in. It was already heard.

The confidence that we have in Him

John writes one sentence near the end of his letter that settles this whole ache, and most of us have read it a hundred times without noticing what it actually says.

And this is the confidence that we have in him, that, if we ask any thing according to his will, he heareth us.1 John 5:14

Take the word confidence first, because the English has cooled it.

The Greek word behind it is the plain civic word for a citizen's right to stand up in the public assembly and speak. It is the right of address. It is not a rating on how well anybody speaks. A citizen who stammers has exactly the same right as a citizen who is eloquent, and no one in that assembly has more of it than anyone else.

That right is yours. Not earned, not graded, not held in trust for you by somebody more fluent. The written word gives it to us, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put you in the room where it belongs to you, so the standing was settled long before the first time you tried and could not begin.

Now look at the verb, and note the tense. He heareth us. Present. Not He will hear once the sentence gets somewhere. He hears.

And look at the one qualifier John does attach, because it is the only one in the verse. According to His will. The condition is on the content, not on the craft. There is not a word in that sentence about phrasing, and there is not a word about it anywhere else either. Nowhere in Scripture does God receive a prayer on the strength of its wording, and nowhere does He turn one back on the same grounds.

So the twelve seconds of nothing were never evidence against you. God has said in His word that He hears, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who carries what you mean when you have not found how to say it, which is precisely why a groan is on record as prayer in Romans 8 and a polished paragraph is not required anywhere.

Now let me say something about the card, and I want to say it carefully, because this is where people go wrong in a hurry.

The card is not the villain of this. A good prayer, written out by a woman who loved an eleven year old boy, is a kindness and not a crutch. Jesus Himself handed His disciples words when they asked Him how to pray, and He did not apologize for it or attach a warning to it. Words given to you by somebody who has walked further than you are a gift, and the person who taught you them is a gift, and nobody in this message is being asked to put either one down.

You are not being told to leave anything behind. You are being told what you also have. Scripture puts the right of address in your own mouth, and the Holy Spirit does not withdraw a gift in order to give you another one.

The trouble was never the card. The trouble is the sentence that grew up quietly underneath sixty years of using it, and the sentence is this: the good words are the ones that reach, and mine are not the good words.

That is what has to go, and it is going tonight.

Because here is what actually happened on that road. The most effective prayer Gideon Marsh ever prayed in his life had four words in it and one of them was his own name. It reached a man on a gravel shoulder who had not wept in front of anyone in over a decade. And it was not more powerful than his mother's prayer because it was better written. It was not better written. It was his.

Now let me say the rest of it to you and not about him, because the man in the dark with the phone in his hand is you.

You know the words you can say. You know exactly how it feels to be the one asked to pray at the table because you are good at it, and to walk out to the car afterward carrying a private thing you have never handed to anybody. That private thing is not a disqualification and never was. The word of God says the right of address is yours, and the Holy Spirit is not standing between you and a sentence He is Himself carrying up.