I Wanted To Be The One Who Weeps

The meeting has finished and it has done the thing a good one does, which is refuse to end, and there are twelve people standing about with tea who were supposed to leave twenty minutes ago.

It was a strong evening. Everybody would say so. A woman prayed for about four minutes in the middle of it and her voice went, and there was that particular quiet afterward that a room only produces when something real has happened in it.

And this is the point where the woman by the window has to do the thing she has done for twenty years, which is work out what she is.

Because during those four minutes, she was thinking.

Not coldly. She was moved, in her own way. But what was actually happening in her, most of the time, was that she was following the shape of what was being prayed and noticing the one thing that had not been named yet, and she prayed it about nine minutes later, in three sentences, in a completely level voice.

Two people said afterward that her prayer was the one that landed for them. That has happened before. It happens fairly often.

And it has never once made a dent in the thing she carries, which is a twenty year suspicion that clarity is what a person has when they do not have a heart.

She has wanted to be the one who weeps since she was about twenty-four. Not for show. Because she believes, in a place she never examines, that what happened in that woman's voice at four minutes is what real prayer is, and that everything she herself has done for two decades has been a competent substitute for it.

Where this is not going

Straight out, so you can read the rest with the tea going cold.

This page is not going to tell you what you have instead. There is nothing arriving at the bottom that names your gift and expects you to be reassured. That would be a page telling you what you are, and this site does not do that.

And it is not going to tell you that thinking is secretly the deeper form of prayer. That is a compliment offered in place of an answer, and you would take it apart in about four seconds, because taking things apart is what you do.

And it is not going to promise you the tears are coming.

You are not being flattered here, and there is no trade being arranged. That is not caution on my part. Scripture handles this in one clause from Paul, and the Holy Spirit has never once needed a woman satisfied with a substitute before He would speak to her.

Paul calls the measurement itself unwise

Here is the sentence, and it is doing something more radical than people notice.

For we dare not make ourselves of the number, or compare ourselves with some that commend themselves: but they measuring themselves by themselves, and comparing themselves among themselves, are not wise.2 Corinthians 10:12

Read what he does not say.

He does not say the comparison came out wrong. He does not say they compared badly or compared the wrong things or should have been more generous in their comparing.

He says the activity is not wise. The instrument is faulty. The whole procedure produces nothing usable, regardless of the result it returns.

Which is the exact procedure you have been running, once a week, for twenty years, in a room with your tea going cold.

You have been putting your interior next to somebody else's exterior, which is a comparison that cannot be conducted honestly by anybody, because you have access to all of your own noise and none of hers.

You have been running an instrument Scripture explicitly calls unwise, and no result it has ever returned about you was information. I am not stretching that. 2 Corinthians 10:12 rules the procedure out rather than correcting its output, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and lands it on a woman by a window at the end of a prayer meeting.

What actually happened at nine minutes

And now the plain thing, which the comparison has hidden from you for two decades.

At nine minutes you prayed three sentences in a level voice, and two people in that room went home differently because of them.

That is not a substitute for something. That is an event. It happened. It had effects in other human beings, which is the only external evidence anybody ever gets about prayer.

The woman at four minutes had an event too. Hers was audible.

The comparison has been treating audibility as the measure and it is not the measure, and no verse anywhere makes it the measure, and you have never examined that assumption because you formed it at twenty-four and assumptions formed at twenty-four do not get audited.

You are not producing a competent imitation of something, and the word never once measures prayer by whether a voice breaks. Scripture records prayers of every temperature without ranking them, and the Spirit who searches all things has been in that room for twenty years and has never once graded you against her.

Handing it over, precisely

Here is the action, and it must be exact.

Handing it over is not deciding you never wanted it.

It is not deciding it will never come.

It is not deciding that clarity is your gift and being satisfied. Nobody here is telling you what your gift is.

It is saying the thing out loud, once, and putting it in His hands rather than running an unwise instrument for another twenty years.

You are able to put it down without pretending you never wanted it, and Scripture nowhere requires a person to feel differently before she can hand something over. The word rules out the measurement and leaves the woman standing, and the Spirit who was given to help our infirmities is not waiting for you to be settled first.