The Fast She Cannot Break

At quarter past two in the morning the prayer room has four people in it and by three it has one. The others are not slacking. They came, they prayed, they meant every word, they have work in the morning and children who get up early and they went home, which is what a person does.

She stays.

She has a chair she always takes, the one with the arm that has gone shiny, and a cardigan she leaves folded on it during the week so that nobody else sits there. She has a blanket over her knees because the heating goes off at midnight. There is a thermos she fills and does not drink from, and a notebook with names in it going back years, and she gets through all of them, every night, out loud, in order.

Wednesday is a fast day. So is Friday. Monday started being one about two years ago and has stayed one. She would tell you, if you asked her in the daylight, that she just loves to pray, and that would be true, and it would not be the whole of it.

Because at about ten to four she starts to get tired, and there is a moment, right there, where she thinks about the drive home and her own bed. And then something comes up in her that she has never once said out loud to another human being, and it says: if you stop, it starts again.

Not in words that clean. It is more like a floor going soft. It is the sense that all of this is holding something in place, and that the something is her, and that the day she is not on that chair at four in the morning, the thing she did will come back around and find her.

So she stays until half past five, and she goes home in the gray light, and she sleeps for two hours, and she is at the school gate at eight looking fine.

She has been doing some version of this for nine years.

Nobody in that church has any idea. They think she is the intercessor, and she is, and the prayers she prays are real prayers and God hears every one of them and I will not have anybody say otherwise. But underneath the loving there is a second engine running, and it does not run on love. It runs on a bill she believes is still open, and the terrible thing about a bill you set yourself is that nobody ever comes to tell you it is settled.

I keep a night watch myself, so I know that room. I know the sound of a woman praying because she loves Him, and I know the sound of a woman praying because she is working something off, and they use the same words.

You know this. Maybe it is not a prayer room. Maybe it is that you are the one who always drives, always hosts, always says yes, always sends the card, always stays late, always takes the difficult one. Maybe you could not name the thing you are making up for. But you know what it is to be unable to stop, and you know that the not stopping is not really about the people you are stopping for.

A demand that never says stop

Paul writes one sentence to a church that had gone back to working for what they had already been given, and it is the sentence for the woman in the shiny chair.

Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us.Galatians 3:13

The word Paul uses for redeemed there means bought out of. Not helped with. Not eased. Bought out, entirely, by somebody who went in and took the whole weight of it onto Himself so that it was not on you in any measure at all.

And notice what He bought us out of. Not out of God's love, which we were never under. Out of the curse. The demand. The system in which what you do is always being weighed and what you owe is never quite cleared, because a demand like that has no upper limit and no closing sentence. It never once says: that is enough now, go to sleep.

You are bought out of the demand entirely, and not helped along with it. Scripture says Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by being made a curse for us, and it is the Holy Spirit, not a strong feeling at three in the morning, who takes the word us and puts a particular woman's name inside it.

That is why she cannot stop. It is not weakness and it is not lack of faith. She is under a demand that has no stopping point built into it, and you cannot rest inside a thing that never says enough. Every hour she gives it, the demand accepts, and says nothing, and waits.

You have been taken out of a system that could never tell you when to stop, and put into a finished work that starts by saying it. It is written that He said it is finished, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a word spoken once on a hill into a cold room at ten to four in the morning.

He is taking the payment, not the life

Now hear me carefully, because there is a way of preaching this that leaves a woman with nothing, and I am not doing that to you.

I am not telling you your nights were wasted. I am not telling you the fasting was foolish or the notebook was pride or that nine years of praying names out loud in the dark was a waste of a life. It was not. God heard every one of those names. Something moved because you were in that chair, and eternity is going to be very clear about what.

What I am taking off you is not the prayer room. It is the tally on the wall.

You are free of the paying, and you are not being asked to give up the loving. His word says we love Him because He first loved us, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can tell, inside you, which of your nights was love and which was payment, when you have never been able to tell them apart yourself.

The two have been braided together for so long that pulling them apart feels like losing both. It is not. Keep the chair. Keep the notebook. Keep Wednesday if Wednesday is a joy to you. What goes is the sentence underneath it, the one that says if you stop, it starts again. That sentence has been in the room with you for nine years and it has never once been true.

You are not holding anything up, and nothing you are carrying is load-bearing in the way you have believed. It is written that He upholds all things by the word of His power, and the same Spirit who searches the deep things of God is the one who can say that to a woman in a way that lands as relief and not as insult.

And if your body has been taking the cost of this, then say so to somebody who can look after you. He never wanted the payment out of your body either, and there is no holiness in a woman running herself into the ground to settle something that was closed before she was born.