The Prayer She Could Say In Her Sleep

She knows the corridor by the sound of it.

Which lifts are slow. Which ward the doors stick on. Where the good chairs are, and where you go if somebody needs to cry without an audience.

Fourteen years of this. She is not staff. She is one of those women a hospital has around it without ever quite arranging to, and every nurse on two floors knows her first name.

She prays with people. That is what she is there for and she is good at it. She is not showy. She does not go on. She has a way of getting hold of a hand and saying something short and true and then being quiet, and people who have never prayed in their lives sit still for it.

Here is what happened in February.

She was at a bedside with a man she had met twice, and his wife on the other side, and she said the words. Good words. The right ones. She meant them in the sense that she was not lying.

And she noticed, with complete clarity, that she was not feeling anything at all.

Not tired. Not distracted. Just level. As level as if she were reading out a train time.

She finished, and she was kind, and she stayed exactly as long as she should have, and she went down in the slow lift and sat in her car in the multi story for a while.

Because the thing that used to be behind the words was not there, and she does not know when it left, and she is frightened of what that says about her.

She has told nobody. If you know that particular quiet, come and sit in the day room a minute. Nobody is going to ask you to examine yourself.

He puts the Spirit in first

Let me say the first thing straight out, because a woman sitting in a car in a multi story has usually already reached a verdict on herself, and it is the wrong one.

A thing that has gone quiet inside you is not evidence that you have gone wrong.

Far more often it is evidence that you have been used. Fourteen years of bedsides is a very long time. Hands that do the same work for decades go hard on the outside so that the work can go on, and nobody reads a nurse's hands as a moral failing.

Hearts do a version of the same thing, and Scripture treats it as something to be healed, never as something to be tried.

And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes.Ezekiel 36:27

Look at the order of that. The Spirit goes in first. The walking follows. God does not stand at a distance and ask a tired woman to generate feeling and then reward her for it. He puts something in, and then the living follows from what was put in.

You are being dealt with as somebody God fills rather than somebody God assesses. Ezekiel 36:27 puts the Spirit in before it asks for a single step, and the verse before it has God removing the heart of stone Himself, which means what you found in that car is a thing He heals and not a charge He files.

Guarding is a posting, not an inspection

Now the second thing, and it keeps a tired woman out of a trap.

Proverbs says to keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life, and almost everybody hears that as an instruction to go in and look for faults.

It is not. The word is a guarding word, the sort you use about something valuable, and the picture in the same breath is a spring in the ground. Nobody stands over a spring with a clipboard. You keep the leaves out of it and you do not let anybody build on top of it. That is the job.

You are not being asked to audit yourself, and you never were. Proverbs 4:23 hands you a spring to protect rather than a self to interrogate, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the protecting from the inside, which is why fourteen years of corridors never once required a self examination to stay good work.

So we are not going in there today. No inventory, no working out when it started, no explaining February.

You are going to hand one thing over. That is the entire move.

You have somewhere to put this, and you are allowed to put it there today. 1 Peter 5:7 says to cast your anxiety on Him because He cares for you, and it is His Spirit who makes that a real transaction rather than a feeling, so the level quiet you found in the car has an address and it is not your own chest.

And under all of it, the thing this site will not run without: God is the one keeping your heart while you keep watch over it. You have not been standing guard over yourself alone in a multi story car park.