The Call She Makes Every Sunday

Every Sunday at two in the afternoon, Marva calls home.

She has done it since 2011, when she came over, and she has not missed more than a handful of Sundays in fourteen years. Her mother is eighty-six and sharp and lives in the house Marva grew up in, and her two brothers are in and out of it, and the house and the brothers and what is happening in that house is the thing.

This article is not going to say what the thing is. It is seven years old and it has not changed and that is all that matters here.

Here is what Marva does while the phone is ringing.

It rings four or five times, because her mother is slow to the phone now. And in those seconds Marva prays. Every week. The same words, more or less, said quickly, said under her breath, said in the gap between dialing and her mother's voice.

She has never once prayed that prayer at any other time.

Not on purpose. It is just that Sunday at two is when it is right in front of her, and the rest of the week she is working and living and it is six thousand miles away and she cannot hold it up in the air all the time or she would not be able to function.

So the prayer lives in the ringing. Four or five seconds, once a week, seven years.

Here is the day it caught.

Her daughter, seventeen, was on the sofa and heard her mother murmuring at the phone and said, "Are you talking to yourself?"

And Marva said, "I'm praying."

And her daughter said, "For like four seconds?"

She was not being unkind. She was seventeen and curious and she went back to her phone.

But Marva sat there while it rang, with her daughter's question in the room, and thought: seven years of four seconds. And she could not decide whether that was faithfulness or whether it was the smallest amount of praying a person could do about the biggest thing in their life.

You have a prayer like that. Squeezed into a gap. Attached to a task. Said quickly, in the same few seconds every time, about something enormous. And somewhere in you there is a suspicion that it does not amount to much.

The depths are a place, not a failing

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

I am not going to tell you the thing in that house is going to change. I do not know. I am not going to tell you to go back, or to stay here, or to send more or send less, because I cannot see your family and I am not going to hand a woman instructions about her mother's house from six thousand miles away and behind a screen.

What I will do is read you the opening of Psalm 130, because of where the man is standing when he says it.

Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O LORD. Lord, hear my voice: let thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications.Psalm 130:1-2

Out of the depths. Not out of a quiet room. Not out of a set-aside hour. Out of the depths, which in the psalms is the language of deep water, of being over your head, of a place a person is in rather than a state a person has chosen.

And what he does from down there is cry. Which is a short, loud, unstructured thing. Not a liturgy. A cry is what you have breath for.

You are praying from a location rather than from a failure, and the psalm names the location without one word of criticism. Psalm 130:1 has a man calling from the depths and the depths are simply where he is, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that off the page and into four seconds of a ringing phone.

Then the second verse, and this is the one for Marva. Let Your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications.

He asks for attentive ears. Which tells you he is aware that what he is producing is not impressive. A person who thought their prayer was magnificent would not need to request attentiveness. He is asking God to lean toward something small.

You have not been bringing something too small to be attended to, and the psalm was written by somebody who worried about exactly that. It is written that he asked for attentive ears, and the Holy Spirit is what makes an ancient worry into a present reassurance.

Four seconds a week

Now let me be careful here, because this is exactly where preaching goes wrong and lands on a tired woman like a weight.

I could turn this into a challenge. I could say, imagine what would happen if you gave it four minutes instead of four seconds. And a certain kind of listener would feel that as inspiration, and Marva would feel it as one more thing she is not doing, on top of a job and a daughter and an ocean.

I am not doing that. Not tonight and not in this article.

You are not being assessed on the duration, and there is no verse anywhere in Scripture that sets a minimum length on a prayer. Nehemiah 2:4 has a man praying in the pause between a king's question and his own answer, and the Holy Spirit is what keeps a short prayer from being read as a small faith.

And here is what I actually want you to see about those four seconds, because it is better than a challenge.

They are not the leftover. They are the point of contact. Marva's whole week has that thing running underneath it, unsayable, six thousand miles wide. Sunday at two is where it surfaces, and the surfacing is not the size of the thing, it is the place the thing comes up for air.

You have been carrying it the whole week, and the four seconds are the visible part of a prayer that has never actually stopped. Romans 8:26 describes the Spirit interceding in what a person cannot put into words, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been carrying the other six days and twenty-three hours.

Say this here rather than at the end, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If seven years of Sunday at two has taken you somewhere heavier than worry, or if what you cannot fix from this distance has begun to press somewhere dangerous, do not sit with that alone. Tell somebody today. Your daughter, a friend at church, your doctor, a counselor, or the 988 crisis line if you live in the United States. That is not me saying one word about your brothers or that house. That is me refusing to leave you on that sofa by yourself.