The Morning Her Window Was Dark

Efrain leaves the house at half past four, and his route to the depot takes him down his mother's street.

It is not the fastest way. It has been the way for nineteen years. At ten to five he comes past the corner and the kitchen window on the left is yellow, always, because at ten to five Dona Marta is up with her coffee going cold beside her and her list in her lap, and the first name on that list has been Efrain since the day he was born.

He has never once stopped. He does not honk. He lifts two fingers off the wheel at a woman who cannot see him and drives on to work, and if you asked him what that was he would say nothing, it is just the way I go.

Then, on an ordinary Tuesday in the dry season, the window was dark.

He was past the corner before it registered. He pulled in at the bakery on the next block and called his sister with the engine running, and it was all fine: their mother had a bad night with her hip, his sister had come at eleven and taken her back to her own house, she was asleep in the back room, she was fine, and everybody would talk later.

Fine. Everything fine.

And Efrain sat in a parked truck on a dark street at ten to five in the morning and found out what he actually believed, which was not what he would have told you.

He believed he had been getting through on her account.

Not in words. He had never put it in words, because in words it sounds absurd, and Efrain is fifty three and a deacon's son and could quote you half the New Testament. But underneath, where the real furniture is, that was the arrangement: there was a woman at a table with a list, and because of her, things held. The job held. The boy came back from the bad year. The scan came back clear. She prayed, and heaven answered her, and Efrain lived downstream of it.

So he did the only thing there was to do, which was to try it himself.

He said, out loud, in the cab, "It is me. It is Efrain. She is asleep."

And then he stopped, because he had no idea what came next. Fifty three years old, in church his whole life, and he had never in his life started one. He had said the ones everybody says. He had said grace and he had said amen after his mother and he had prayed the words on the card at the funeral. He had never opened his own mouth into the quiet and gone first.

Then, and this is the part he did not tell anybody for over a year, the words came.

Not a voice. Nothing on the windshield. Just that his own plain sentences kept arriving, one after another, awkward as a boy asking for a job, and none of them ran out. He talked about the hip. He talked about his sister, who is tired. He talked about the boy. Twenty minutes went by in a parked truck outside a closed bakery, and when he finally looked up the sky had gone gray at the edges and he was late for the first time in nine years.

The tap had been plumbed to that house the whole time. Nobody had ever turned it.

You have a Dona Marta. She might be your grandmother, or an aunt, or a man from your old church who prayed for you once in a hallway and you have been living off it ever since.

Nothing here is against her

Start with this, because everything else falls over without it.

She was never the veil. She was the one who kept telling you there was not one.

Every hour that woman spent at that table was real, and it was not wasted, and God is not disappointed in her for how much of your load she carried. People who pray for other people are doing something Scripture commands and Christ Himself does at the right hand of the Father this minute. This message is not asking you to think less of her, and it is not asking you to stop asking anybody to pray for you, and if it were, you should close it.

What it is doing is telling you what was on the other side of a door you never tried.

Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water.Hebrews 10:22, KJV

Draw near. Not send word. Not have somebody more fluent go in on your behalf and come back out and tell you how it went. Draw near, with a true heart, in full assurance, and the writer has just spent the whole paragraph before it explaining why anybody would dare: there is boldness to enter, and the way in was opened by a torn veil and the blood of Jesus, and it stays open.

So take this over yourself right now: you have your own way in, and it is not a lesser version of hers. The word says the way was opened for whoever comes, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings a person up to the throne, and He has never once stopped a man at the door to ask who sent him.

Here is what has to go, and it has to go by name.

That quiet arithmetic in you, that God knows her name and only vaguely knows yours, has no right to stay in your truck. It sounds like humility. It is not humility, it is accounting, and it has you filed as a dependent on somebody else's account when Scripture puts your name on the deed itself. His Spirit is the one who cries out in you and calls God Father, and He does not do that on behalf of a stranger.

And the plainness of your words is not the problem you think it is.

You have heard people pray beautifully. Your mother, probably, with forty years of practice and a vocabulary built for it. And somewhere along the way you drew a conclusion that has been quietly running your prayer life: that praying is a skill, and other people have it, and you would only be doing an inferior version of something already being done well.

You are not auditioning. Hebrews 10:22 says a true heart, and it says full assurance, and it says nothing whatsoever about fluency, and the Holy Spirit who wrote that line through a man's hand is not standing over your shoulder marking it.

That is the whole point of what was torn open. Not that access got easier for people who are good at this. That access got personal, for everybody, by name, at once.