The Prayer List Became A Spreadsheet

It started with forty people and a phone tree, which is a thing she still cannot describe without her voice doing something.

Six years ago. Somebody was ill, badly, and there was no system, and she made one in an evening on the back of an envelope, and forty people prayed, and the thing that happened in that church over the next four months is the reason half of them still come.

That was the best thing she has ever been part of.

And this is Tuesday evening, and she is at the kitchen table with the laptop open, and what is on the screen is a spreadsheet with two hundred and sixty rows.

Names. Dates opened. Category. Update requested, yes or no. A column she added in year three for whether the family has given permission to share, because of an incident. A tab for the people who have asked to be removed. A second tab for the ones who asked to be removed and then asked to be put back.

She has been at this for an hour and eleven minutes and she has not prayed once.

That is what she noticed tonight, and it is not the first time she has noticed it, but it is the first time it has landed with the whole weight on it.

She maintains a system now. She is good at maintaining it. Two hundred and sixty rows is a real service and people are genuinely helped by it and nobody else in that church would do it half as carefully.

And the thing she loved, the forty people and the envelope and the four months, is somewhere underneath two hundred and sixty rows, and she has no way to say that to anybody without it sounding like the beginning of a resignation from the only thing she has ever been sure about.

Where this will not take you

Let me say it plainly at the start, because you will read carefully and you will be looking for the turn.

Nothing on this page is going to tell you to hand it over, cut it back, ask for help, or speak to anybody. Not tonight and not by implication at the end. Nobody here can see your church or those two hundred and sixty rows or what would happen to them, and a page that cannot see them has no business steering you.

And nothing here is going to hand you a system that works better. There is no method coming and there is no list at the bottom.

You are not being nudged toward anything, and there is nothing you have to decide tonight. That is not me being gentle with you. Scripture is what makes room for the plain sentence before any decision, and the Holy Spirit has never once required a woman to have a solution before He would sit down with her.

Jesus talks about the weight of a thing

Here is the sentence I want beside that laptop, and it is not usually read as a sentence about load.

Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.Matthew 11:29-30

Notice that He does not say there is no yoke. He says there is one, and He says something specific about its weight.

Easy. Light. Those are measurements. Which means weight is a thing He expects a person to notice and to be able to report on, and that a load which has stopped being light is information rather than a failure of devotion.

He is not saying the Christian life has no work in it. He is contrasting His yoke with something else, with loads that people had been given by other people, and He invites the comparison.

You are permitted to notice that a load has stopped being light, and Scripture treats that noticing as ordinary rather than as ingratitude. I am not stretching that. Matthew 11:30 makes weight an explicit category, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and gives a woman at a kitchen table permission to say what she has been carrying.

What actually happened to it

Now let me say the plain mechanical thing, because it will take some of the shame out of the room.

You did not lose your love for prayer. Watch the sequence.

A real need arose and you built a thing to serve it. It worked. Because it worked, more people came. Because more people came, it needed structure. Because it needed structure, you built structure, and you are good at building structure, so it got built well. And every one of those steps was right and faithful and generous and you would do all of them again.

And the accumulated result of six years of right steps is a spreadsheet with two hundred and sixty rows and a woman who has not prayed in an hour and eleven minutes.

Nobody did anything wrong. That is exactly why it has been impossible to say. There is no villain in this and there is nothing to complain about, and a person cannot bring a complaint with no villain in it, so she brings nothing.

You have not drifted from the thing you loved, you have been carrying the successful outcome of it, and those are two completely different reports. The word puts a load's weight on the table as something a person may say out loud, and the Spirit who searches all things has been at that kitchen table on Tuesdays for six years.

The one that has actually gone unsaid

And here is the deeper part, and it is not about the spreadsheet.

For a long time there has been a real recurring fact about your Tuesday evenings that has never been said to God out loud. Not out of coldness. Because it is about prayer, and saying to God that the prayer thing has gone heavy felt like the one sentence you were not allowed to bring Him.

So it has been carried rather than handed over, and that is a different arrangement and it costs far more than the rows do.

He has known since about the third year.

You are welcome to bring Him the sentence about prayer itself, and He has never once asked you to pretend a load is light when it is not. The word has Him inviting a comparison of weights out loud, and the Spirit who was given to help our infirmities is not waiting for a version of this that sounds more spiritual.