The Fastest Word On My Phone

There are forty-one people in the family chat and Char Tanaka has the fastest thumb in it.

Somebody's scan results come back Thursday. Somebody's boy did not get the apprenticeship. The baby has been running a fever for two days and nobody can get the clinic to pick up. And within about nine seconds, under every single one of those, in a group of forty-one people, there is Char.

praying

Sometimes with a heart after it. Sometimes with two hands together. Nine years of it. She has typed that word more times than she has typed her own address.

She is not a liar. She means it when she types it. Her chest actually tightens when the message comes in about the baby, and she actually wants the fever to break, and she actually believes God is the one who breaks fevers.

And then the phone goes face down on the counter and she puts the rice on.

Here is how she got here, and she has never once said it out loud. Her mother-in-law prays like a house on fire. Auntie Bernie will go twenty minutes, at the table, with everyone's names in it and half the Psalms and a part in the middle where she thanks God for things nobody else has noticed yet. Char has heard that woman pray over a broken washing machine in a way that made her cry.

Char's own praying comes out in about eleven words. Then it stops. She stands there in her kitchen with her eyes closed, having said eleven words, hearing how they sounded, and thinks: that is not it.

So somewhere around year three she made an arrangement with herself that she never wrote down. The people who can pray will pray. She will be the one who is fast. She will be the first one in the chat every time, and that will be her part, and it is a real part, and everyone appreciates it.

Then a Tuesday night in October, 9:41, and the message that came in was not the usual kind. Her brother-in-law's truck had gone off the highway coming down off the mountain and they were taking him in.

Char was in her car in the store parking lot with a trunk full of groceries. She had the phone up. Her thumb went to the word.

And it stopped there.

She got out of the car. She did not decide to; she just got out of it. She walked down past the shopping carts to the low wall at the edge of the lot where the ground drops to the water, and there was wind coming in hard enough that she had to hold her hair back with one hand.

And she said, out loud, into it:

"God. It is Char. Please do not let him die."

And she stood there feeling absolutely certain she had done it wrong.

So she said it again, worse. Then again, with his wife's name in it. Then again, and by then she was not making sentences, and the last time she said it, it was only his name, said the way you say a name.

Eleven minutes, on a wall, in the wind, with the carts rattling behind her.

She does not remember driving home. She does remember that the groceries were still in the trunk in the morning and the ice cream was ruined and she did not care about the ice cream.

And what she cannot get away from, weeks later, is not the hospital and not the phone calls and not any of what came after.

It is that for eleven minutes at the edge of a parking lot, she was a woman talking to God with nobody standing in between.

Pray one for another

James is writing to ordinary people in a hard season and he tells them to do two things in the same breath.

Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.James 5:16

One for another.

That phrase settles something before we go a step further, and it settles it in favor of your family chat. God's design has people praying for each other. Auntie Bernie's twenty minutes at the table are a genuine gift to a family, God has heard every one of them, and nothing here is taking a thing away from that woman.

What is not in the verse is an arrangement where one person in a family does the praying and everybody else forwards.

Now look at the word James picks for whose prayer prevails. Righteous. Not eloquent. Not practiced. Not the one who knows where the Psalms are. And righteous is not a rank you climb toward by praying well for long enough. It is a standing, handed over, bought and paid for by Christ, and it was put on you the day you came to Him.

So hear it plainly: you already are the righteous person in that verse. That is not a level you are working toward, it is a robe you are wearing right now. I am not being generous with you. Scripture says He hath made us accepted in the beloved, and it is the Holy Spirit, not your fluency, who takes the words of an accepted person straight into the throne room.

And then James does something so kind that people read past it. His example of a prevailing prayer is Elijah, which sounds like the worst possible choice, and then he adds one clause: Elijah was a man subject to like passions as we are.

He anticipated exactly what you would do with the example. He knew you would say, well, that is Elijah. So he wrote the ordinary right into the sentence.

The line you have drawn between your prayers and hers is not a line God recognizes. It is written that there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, and He has never once delegated that seat to the best speaker in your family. The same Spirit who carries a twenty minute prayer carries eleven words the identical distance, because the distance was never the point and He is the one doing the carrying.

Let me say the hard tender thing now.

The word you have been typing is not a lie. It has never been a lie. It is an intention that could not find a voice, and there is a difference, and God has known the difference the whole time.

You were never on hold. Nine years of typing it and meaning it and not saying it did not put you at the back of any line. The written word says the Lord is nigh unto all them that call upon him, and it does not add a clause about the quality of the calling. And the Holy Spirit has been in that kitchen with you every time you shut your eyes and got eleven words out and decided that was not it.

It was it. It was always it. Nobody ever told you.

And now let me stop saying she, because the woman with her hair whipping across her face at the edge of a parking lot is you.

You know the nine second reflex. You know the small relief of having done something. You know, too, the thing underneath it that you would be embarrassed to say at a table: somewhere along the way you decided that God has a better line open to the people who sound better, and you took yourself off it, politely, without telling anybody, and you have been serving the family from the other side of the glass ever since.

That decision is off you tonight. You have your own access, bought at the same price as everybody else's, and the Father knows your voice without anybody announcing you. Scripture says through Him we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father, and one Spirit means the same Spirit who carries Auntie Bernie carries you, in the car, in the wind, at 9:41 at night, with the carts rattling.