His Brother Still Takes That Road

The road runs past Dale's kitchen window and Wesley's truck goes down it most evenings between six and seven.

Dale does not watch on purpose. He would like that understood. He is doing the dishes or he is at the table and the truck goes by and he sees it, the way you see anything that goes past a window you happen to be facing.

But he knows the sound of it. And on the evenings it does not go by he notices that too.

Dale got clear of the same thing Wesley is still inside about six years ago. It was a family arrangement and it ran through a business and there was a stretch in the middle of it where both brothers were in the same set of terms, and Dale got out and Wesley did not, and the reasons are not this article's business.

They are fine. That is what people say about them and it is true. They see each other. Nobody is estranged. There is a subject that does not get raised and both of them keep it unraised with real skill.

Here is what Dale does about it.

He prays when the truck goes by. Every evening, six years. It is not planned and he did not decide to start; it just began happening, the way habits do around a window.

And what he prays is: get him out.

That is the whole prayer. Three words. Six years.

Here is the evening it caught.

His wife, at the sink beside him, said, "You always stop when he goes past."

And Dale said, "Do I?"

And she said, "Every time. You go quiet for about four seconds and then you carry on."

And Dale did not answer, because he had not known he did that, and because he was working out how many evenings that made and had got as far as two thousand before he stopped counting.

You know that. You watch something you cannot change, from a window or a road or a phone, and you have been saying the same three words about it for years, and somebody finally noticed you doing it.

Availing is not controlling

Let me put down what I am not doing tonight, so you can stop bracing.

I am not going to tell you to talk to Wesley. I am not going to tell you not to. I do not know your brother or that business and I am not going to reach into a family from behind a screen. And I am not going to tell you that he will get out, because I do not know that, and telling a man that about his own brother would be a cruelty dressed up as encouragement.

What I will do is read you a sentence at the end of James and slow down on the verb.

The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.James 5:16

Availeth much.

It is an old word and it is worth being exact about it. It means to be strong, to be able, to have force. It is a word about power being genuinely present.

And notice what it is not. It is not achieveth. It is not controlleth. It is not a word about outcomes being delivered on request.

James chooses a word that says: this has real force in it, and stops there.

You are doing something with actual force in it, and Scripture says so without once promising you a result. James 5:16 says the prayer avails much rather than saying it obtains what is asked, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that distinction off the page and into a kitchen at six in the evening.

And look at the example James picks immediately afterward. Elijah, and the rain. And that account, in 1 Kings, has Elijah praying and then sending a servant to look seven times, and six of those times the man comes back and says there is nothing.

James selects, as his illustration of prayer that avails, an account with six negative reports in it.

You have not been failing on the evenings nothing changed, and the example Scripture chose has more nothing in it than something. It is written that the servant went and looked seven times, and the Holy Spirit is what keeps a long stretch of no visible answer from being read as a verdict.

Three words is not a small prayer

Now let me be careful here, because this is where somebody gets hurt.

Somebody would tell Dale that his prayer needs work. That three words is thin, that he should pray Scripture over his brother, that he needs more specificity or more faith or more time.

I am not doing that. Two thousand evenings of three words is not thin. It is one of the more remarkable things I have heard about a man and a window.

You are not being graded on the wording, and Scripture never once measures a prayer by its length. Nehemiah 2:4 has a man praying in the pause between a question and his own answer, and the Holy Spirit is what keeps a short prayer from being read as a small one.

But here is what I do want to look at, and it is not the length.

Get him out. Those three words are a request for a specific action, and a specific action is a thing a man can be waiting on, and a man who has been waiting on a specific action for six years has been, without meaning to, keeping score.

That is why the evenings the truck does not go past register at all. He has been reading the road for results.

You have never been the one keeping score, and no verse anywhere assigns a person the job of auditing another person's road. James 5:16 puts force in the praying and outcome nowhere in the sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an accounting out of a man's hands.

Say this here rather than at the end, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If the six years have gone somewhere heavier than watchful, or if the evenings at that window have started to take something out of you, do not carry that alone. Tell somebody this week. Your wife, a neighbor, your doctor, a counselor, or the 988 crisis line if you live in the United States. And if you ever believe your brother is in real danger, then the ordinary thing is to call for help where you live rather than manage it alone. That is me refusing to leave you at that sink by yourself.