The Card That Went Through The Wash

Corinne Hyde had prayed the same prayer every night for fourteen years, off a card.

She copied it out in 2011 from a book somebody gave her after Ray died. Blue ink, her own careful hand, both sides of an index card. She took it to the office supply place on Water Street and had it laminated for a dollar fifty, and the woman behind the counter said, "That's a keeper, then," and Corinne said yes it was.

It was a beautiful prayer. Whoever wrote it knew exactly what they were doing. There was a line in the middle about the night watch that carried her through more than one two in the morning, and she never got tired of it, not once in fourteen years.

The trouble was what happened when she put it down.

Corinne's own words came out thin. That was the only way she could ever describe it. She would try, on the drive, or at the sink, and what came out was "God, please. You know. Amen," and it sounded to her like a woman apologizing for taking up somebody's afternoon. Flat. Small. Nothing anybody would keep.

So she read the card. Every night, out loud, at the edge of the bed. It was a good prayer and it was not hers, and both of those were true at once, and she had made her peace with it the way a person makes peace with a limp.

Then a Tuesday in February, and the cardigan went in the wash with the card still in the pocket.

She found it in the dryer. The lamination had let go at one corner and taken on water, the blue ink had gone to a soft gray cloud, and the card had curled up like a leaf. Two words in the second line were still readable. That was all of it.

She stood in the laundry room in her stocking feet holding the thing, sixty-eight years old, feeling about nine.

She sat on the edge of the bed that night with it in her lap and nothing at all in her mouth.

And after a while, because she could not think of anything better, she said out loud:

"It's me. I'm here. I don't know how to do this without the card."

That was the entire prayer.

Then she sat there and got hot in the face about it, because it was exactly as thin as she had always been afraid it was. Fourteen years of somebody else's beautiful sentences, and this was what had been underneath them the whole time.

Except.

Except that something in the room was different, and she noticed it before she could put a name to it, and when the name arrived it made her laugh out loud, alone, in her own bedroom, at nine forty at night.

She had not been reciting. She had been talking to Somebody.

She kept the card. It is in the drawer of the nightstand, curled and gray and unreadable. She never had another one made.

Teach us to pray

There is one line in Luke I want to put in your hands, and it is the request, not the prayer that comes after it.

And it came to pass, that, as he was praying in a certain place, when he ceased, one of his disciples said unto him, Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples.Luke 11:1

Read what they actually asked for. Not make us feel it. Not give us confidence. Teach us to pray. They wanted words, because they had been standing near a Man who prayed like nothing they had ever heard and they had nothing like it in their own mouths.

And here is what Jesus does not do. He does not tell them to quit leaning on somebody else's words. He does not say just be yourself. He does not point out that John's disciples were using a form and suggest they should be past that by now.

He gives them a form.

He hands grown men a prayer with the words already in it, and the church has been saying it out loud ever since, off cards and out of books and from memory in hospital corridors, and not one syllable of that is a lesser way to pray. If borrowing the words were the problem, Jesus made the problem worse on purpose.

But look at the first word He gave them.

Father.

You are not standing in a line, and you are not waiting on a turn. You have the word Father in your mouth, and Jesus Himself put it there. That is not my kindness dressed up as doctrine. The written word records exactly what He handed them, and the Holy Spirit is named in Romans as the one who cries Abba, Father from inside a person who could not manage it alone.

The form was never a substitute for access. It was a door with the hinges already hung, and the first word swings it.

Now the thin thing. Let me say it precisely, because you have never said it out loud.

You believe that when you pray in your own words, God is receiving a lesser version. The card is the good one. The friend who prays out loud at the table is the good one. Yours is the one He puts up with.

That idea has no right to stay in your head. It never had the standing to be in there. Scripture nowhere says God receives the eloquent. It says the Spirit helps our infirmities, and that when we do not know what to pray as we ought, He Himself makes intercession within us, which is not the arrangement of a God tolerating an amateur.

So keep the card. Nothing here takes it from you. Whoever wrote that prayer meant every word of it, it carried you through nights it was built for, and God was in every one of them. Honor her. Keep the friend who prays out loud better than you do, and go on asking her, because Jesus did not build His body out of people who need nobody.

You were given your own access, and it was given the day you were given Christ. The written word says that through Him we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father, and the Holy Spirit is that Spirit, and there is no smaller word in that verse for people whose sentences come out plain.

Here is the turn, and it is a small one, and it changes everything.

The card was never the reason He listened.

He was listening on the nights you read it. He was listening on the nights you were too tired to find it. This is yours: an open line, in your own voice, at your own volume, with nobody standing in between. Scripture calls Him a Father who knows what you have need of before you ask, and the Spirit is the one who carries a plain sentence up as easily as a polished one.