The Prayer He Had Stopped Counting

The shop opens at seven and Farid has prayed in the storeroom before opening for as long as he has had the shop. Fourteen years of that. And for seven of those years there was one thing in it, always the same, always last, always the sentence he actually meant.

He and Yasmin have no children.

That is the whole of it. Nothing complicated. They have seen the doctors, they have done what the doctors said, they have been told what is likely and what is not likely, and they are both forty-one now and Yasmin does not talk about it and Farid prays about it in a storeroom at ten to seven.

Here is the strange part, and it is the reason this article exists.

For the first three years or so, he knew exactly how long it had been. He could have told you in months. He knew the anniversaries and he dreaded them, and every so often he would say to God, plainly, this is the fourth year.

He does not do that anymore. He has not done the arithmetic in a long time. If you cornered him he could work it out, but he has quietly stopped keeping the number, and if you asked him why he would say something like, what would be the point, and change the subject.

That is not faith and it is not unbelief. It is a man taking the batteries out of a smoke alarm that will not stop going off.

Here is the evening it caught. His nephew, nineteen, working in the shop for the summer, saw him come out of the storeroom and said, half joking, "Every morning, uncle. What are you asking Him for?"

And Farid said something light and moved past him.

And then that night, closing up alone, he stood in the storeroom and heard the question again and answered it out loud, to nobody. The whole prayer. The way he used to say it in the first year, with the specifics in it, with the names they had picked out in it.

And then he said, into the quiet: "How long has that been?" And he did not know. And that undid him more than the prayer had.

You have a prayer like that. Something you have carried so long that you stopped counting on purpose, because the counting had begun to do more damage than the wanting.

The tense the angel used

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

I am not going to tell you what is going to happen or when. I do not know. I am not going to tell you that your particular thing will come, because that would be a promise I have no right to make with somebody else's life. I am not going to explain the seven years to you either. I have no explanation and anybody who offers you one is guessing in a confident voice.

What I will do is stand you next to an old man in a temple, because of one word an angel says to him.

Zacharias is a priest. He and Elisabeth are, in the text's own phrase, well stricken in years. They had wanted a child and they do not have one and that ship, by any human reckoning, has long sailed. He is doing his ordinary duty, burning incense, when the angel appears and says:

Fear not, Zacharias: for thy prayer is heard; and thy wife Elisabeth shall bear thee a son.Luke 1:13

Now stop at the middle clause, because that is the one everybody reads past on the way to the baby.

Thy prayer is heard.

Which prayer? He is an old man doing the incense in his priestly course. He is not, at that moment, praying for a child. That prayer belongs to a man decades younger, in a different house, with a different face. Whatever Zacharias is saying at that altar, it is almost certainly the prayers of his office.

And the angel says: your prayer is heard. Reaching back over the decades to a prayer the man himself had stopped counting.

You have a prayer on file that you stopped keeping track of, and the file is not yours and never was. Luke 1:13 has an angel referring to a request older than the man's own record of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that into a storeroom at closing time.

And notice what the angel does not say. He does not say, your prayer has finally been heard. He does not say, you kept at it and God noticed. He does not say the persistence did it. He states a condition: it is heard. As a fact. As something that has been true across all the intervening quiet.

You were heard on the first morning, and every silent year since has been a year of being heard rather than a year of being ignored. It is written that his prayer was heard, and the Holy Spirit is what makes an ancient tense sit down in a present room.

Not counting is not the same as not caring

Now let me be careful here, because this could easily be turned into a rebuke, and it is not one.

What Farid did, taking the batteries out, is not a failure. I want to say that plainly. It is what a person does when a thing has hurt in the same place for long enough. Some people count and it keeps them tender. Some people count and it makes them bitter, and they stop counting in order to stay kind. Both of those are human beings doing their best inside something that has no good options.

You are not being examined tonight on how you have carried it, and Scripture never grades anybody on their method of surviving a long wait. Luke 1 never once tells us how Zacharias handled the decades, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a comfort from turning into an audit.

What I do want to take off you is a particular idea that grows in a silence. The idea is that not being answered is a message. That the years are God saying something. That the quiet is a communication and the communication is no.

That is not in the text. Zacharias got decades of quiet and one sentence at the end of it, and the sentence was it is heard, past and present, all the way through.

You have not been receiving a message in the silence, because Luke 1:13 makes the silence a period of being heard rather than a period of being answered no. That is the verse, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a wrong reading off a person's chest.

Say this here rather than at the end, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If seven years of this has taken you somewhere darker than sadness, or if the closing up alone tonight went somewhere you do not want to say out loud, do not carry that by yourself. Tell somebody before you sleep. Your wife, your brother, your doctor, a counselor, or the 988 crisis line if you live in the United States. That is not me saying one thing about what will or will not happen for you. That is me refusing to leave you in that storeroom on your own.