Named In Prayers You Will Never Hear

There is a right way to do it and she has done it the same way for eleven years.

Kettle first. Then the chair by the window, not the other one. Then she turns the envelope over, and it has to be an envelope, because envelopes are the best paper in the house and always have been, and this one has been copied out from the last one twice because the folds wear through.

The list runs down the back of it in her small handwriting. Her neighbor's boy, who is twenty-six and in trouble. The woman at the pharmacy whose husband is not well and who told her once, briefly, at the counter, and has never mentioned it again. A family in a country she has to sound out, from a leaflet she read fourteen years ago and cannot make herself throw away. Believers she has only ever heard of as a category, in places where it costs them. Three names crossed through with a single line, because they died and she could not bring herself to scrub them off the paper.

She goes down it out loud, every morning, before anything else in the day gets a look in. It takes about nine minutes.

And it is two years, now, since she was in the same room as another believer. Not a complaint. A fact, like the weather.

Then one morning she gets to the bottom of the envelope and something turns over quietly in her chest, and it is not self-pity and it is far too plain to be drama. It is arithmetic. She has been holding half the world up in front of God for eleven years, and she is fairly sure she is not on anybody's envelope anywhere.

You know that thought. It is not loud. It arrives in the middle of doing the good thing, and it does not stop you doing the good thing, and it sits down beside you afterward and waits.

Mention

Paul opens his letter to Rome by telling them something they had no way of knowing.

Understand the situation first, because it changes the sentence. He has never been there. He says so a few lines later: he has planned the trip many times and been prevented every time, and at the point of writing he still has not set foot in the city. He is writing to a church he has not met, in a place he has not been, about people whose faces he could not pick out of a crowd on the street.

And here is how he opens.

First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for you all, that your faith is spoken of throughout the whole world. For God is my witness, whom I serve with my spirit in the gospel of his Son, that without ceasing I make mention of you always in my prayers.Romans 1:8-9

Make mention. It is a plain word and it means what it says, the act of bringing somebody up, naming them, holding them out. He does it without ceasing, he says, and he swears to it, which is a strange amount of weight to put behind a small claim, unless he knew they would find it hard to believe.

Now do the honest thing with that verse and put yourself on the receiving end of it, because somebody in Rome was. There were people in that city who got this letter read out to them, and in the middle of it they learned that a man they had never met, in another country, had been holding them up to God for years, by the time they found out about it. They had no idea. They had been prayed for the whole time, in a house they had never seen, in a language some of them did not read.

You have been mentioned, and the mentioning never once required anybody to know your name. Romans 1:9 has Paul praying hard for a church he had not visited, and the Spirit of God carries a prayer to its right address without needing the address written on the front of it.

I know exactly what the objection is, because you have already made it. Paul knew who they were. He had a city. He had a church in mind. Nobody has you in mind.

Hold on to that objection for one more section, because it does not survive it.

Prayers aimed at a category still land on a person

Every hour of every day, somewhere, believers pray this way, in exactly these words or something close to them.

For the ones who are alone tonight. For the housebound. For everyone who is awake and afraid at this hour. For the ones who cannot get to anybody. For believers in this town who have nobody to say it to. For the sick, and for whoever is sitting up with them.

You have prayed that way yourself. It is on your envelope in three or four places, in fact, because a category is what you have when you do not have a name.

Now here is the part that shifts the ground. A category prayer is vague to the person praying. It is not vague to God. He is not working from a heading, checking whether anybody happens to fit. He knows precisely who is awake and afraid at this hour, He knows the room, He knows the chair, and when that prayer goes up He does not have to guess where to put it.

Which means the two years you mentioned are not a gap in the record. They are two years in which people who could not have picked you out of a photograph have been praying, in categories, straight at you.

You are named in prayers you will never hear, and the naming has always been God's part rather than the mentioner's. Romans 1:9 shows a man praying without ceasing for people he had never seen, and the delivering of it was the Spirit's work, never the accuracy of the one asking.

And there is one more, and it is older than any of it.

On the last night, praying out loud where His friends could hear Him, Jesus said He was not praying for those men only, but for all who would believe on Him through their word. That is a prayer with a shape, and the shape has you inside it. Before your grandparents were born. Before the language you pray in existed in the form you speak it.

You were prayed for by name in the Son's own mouth, and it happened long before you were anybody. John 17:20 is where He said it out loud, and the Holy Spirit carried that word down through the centuries until it arrived in a room He had already seen.