The Porch Light She Leaves On

Verna has left the porch light on every night since March of 2021.

She is seventy-three. She lives in the house her husband built in 1974 on a piece of road that has three houses on it and one of them empty. Her grandson Cole lived with her from when he was nine until he was twenty-two, and then there was a bad stretch, and then he left, and the leaving was not a fight exactly, it was worse than a fight, it was a Tuesday where he took his things while she was at the church and left a note that said he was sorry and not to look for him.

She looked for him. For about a year. Then she stopped in the way a person stops when there is nowhere left to look.

And every night since, when she goes around the house, she flips the porch light on. Every night. She has changed that bulb eleven times.

She does not call it praying. If you asked her whether she prays about Cole she would say yes, of course, all the time, and she would mean the words she says in the morning with her coffee. The light she would not mention. The light is just the light.

Here is what she says when she flips it, out loud, every night, and has said every night for four years:

"Lord, if he comes."

That is the whole sentence. It does not have an ending. She never finishes it. She has never once said what she wants the Lord to do if he comes, because she has never got that far.

Here is the evening it caught.

Her neighbor Dot, who has known her fifty years, was on the porch late and saw her do it, and said, "You still leave that on."

And Verna said, "Yes."

And Dot said, "Every night?"

And Verna said, "Every night."

And Dot was quiet a minute and then said, "Do you know what that is?"

And Verna said, "It's a light, Dot."

And Dot said, "It's a prayer with a switch on it."

And then she went home, because Dot is a woman who says one thing and goes, and Verna sat on that porch until it got cold.

You have something like that. Not a prayer you would list. An act. A light, a plate you still set, a road you drive past, a number you keep. Done every day at some cost, and never once counted in your own mind as having anything to do with God.

Before they call

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

I am not going to tell you your grandson is coming home. I do not know, and no one on earth should say that to a woman about her own boy in order to make an article feel better at the end. I am not going to tell you what the four years are for. I do not know that either.

What I will do is read you one line out of Isaiah 65, and I want you to notice that the order in it is impossible.

And it shall come to pass, that before they call, I will answer; and while they are yet speaking, I will hear.Isaiah 65:24

Before they call, I will answer.

That is not how anything works. In every other arrangement in the world the request precedes the response. One asks, and then the answer comes. The verse turns it around, deliberately, and puts the answering first.

And then it does it again, in miniature: while they are yet speaking, I will hear. Not after the sentence. During it. Before it is finished. Which is worth something specific to a woman whose sentence has never once been finished in four years.

You have been answered ahead of the asking, and the sequence in that verse was written the wrong way round on purpose. Isaiah 65:24 puts the answering before the calling, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that off the page and onto a porch at ten at night.

Now, be careful with what that verse promises, because people abuse it. It is not saying you get what you ask for before you ask. That is not the word used. It says He answers, and He hears, which is about His attention and His response, not about outcomes. The verse is describing a God who is already turned toward you before you open your mouth.

You were never speaking into a delay, because the turning toward happened first and has been in place the whole four years. It is written that He answers before they call, and the Holy Spirit is what makes an impossible order into a present reality.

The light is not nothing

Now let me be careful here, because this is where a message like this could go wrong.

I am not going to tell you the light will bring him home. It will not. Verna knows it will not. There is nobody sitting on that porch under any illusion that a forty-watt bulb has power over a young man three states away, and I am not going to insult a seventy-three-year-old woman by suggesting otherwise.

What I am going to do is refuse the other error, which is the one she has been making, and which is much quieter.

She has decided the light is not prayer. She has filed it under habit, or under sentiment, or under something an old woman does. And that filing means that for four years the single most consistent, most costly, most deliberate thing she has done toward God about her grandson has been happening entirely outside her own account of her prayer life.

You have been praying in a form you did not recognize, and Scripture is comfortable with prayers that do not look like prayers. Romans 8:26 says the Spirit helps our weakness with groanings that cannot be uttered, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries what a person cannot get into words.

Look at what the light actually is. A daily act. Costly, in the small way that matters. Directed at one person. Performed in the presence of God, by a woman who says His name out loud while she does it. There is no definition of prayer anywhere in the church's history that excludes that.

You are not required to finish the sentence for it to have been received, and the verse specifically covers the part that is still being spoken. Isaiah 65:24 says He hears while they are yet speaking, and the Holy Spirit is what makes an unfinished sentence a complete transaction.

Say this here rather than at the end, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If four years of that switch has taken you somewhere darker than sadness, or if sitting on that porch after Dot went home went further than cold, do not carry that alone. Tell somebody tomorrow. Dot, your pastor, your doctor, a counselor, or the 988 crisis line if you live in the United States. That is not me saying anything at all about your grandson. That is me refusing to leave you on that porch by yourself.