I Took It Off The List

The notebook is in the drawer under the tea towels, which is not where it should be, and it comes out with a rubber band round it and a receipt from 2016 acting as a bookmark.

She is only looking for a pen.

She sits down on the kitchen floor with her back against the cupboard door and reads her own handwriting from years ago. There is a list on the inside cover. Seven things, numbered, in the careful capitals she uses when she is being serious with God. Some of them are almost funny now. Number three sorted itself out and she never noticed. Number five happened, actually happened, and she has never once gone back and looked at it.

And then there is number two, and her whole chest goes quiet.

She can date the year she stopped writing it. Not the year she stopped wanting it, because she has never stopped wanting it. The year she stopped putting it on the page. There was no decision. Nobody announced anything. She just noticed one evening that she had written the list out again and it was not on it, and she felt something that was almost relief, and she did not put it back.

You do not abandon a prayer like that in a moment. It gets quieter over about four years. First you stop saying it in front of other people, because you can hear how long you have been saying it. Then you stop saying it out loud alone, because the sound of your own voice asking for the same thing again does something to you. Then you say it once a month, in a sort of shorthand, and then you say it only when something reminds you, and then a year goes by.

And it is not despair. That is the thing that would surprise people. She is not angry with God. She would tell you honestly that He has been good to her, and it is true. She simply took one item off a list and let it go somewhere she does not look, and there is a small gray ache where it used to be, and she has learned to move around it the way you learn to move around a piece of furniture in a dark room.

She sits on the kitchen floor holding a notebook and says, to nobody, out loud: I stopped asking for that.

And now I am going to stop saying she.

Because you have a number two. You know exactly what it is. You knew before the end of the first paragraph, and something in you has been braced ever since, because you have made your peace with it and you would rather not have it stirred.

I am not going to promise you it is coming. Stay anyway. There is something here that is better than a promise nobody is authorized to make.

He answered the prayer that had been given up

There is a man in the first chapter of Luke who is the patron saint of everyone who has quietly taken something off a list.

His name is Zechariah, he is a priest, and he is old. So is his wife. The thing they wanted, they wanted for decades, and the text is very plain that it never came. He is chosen by lot to go into the holy place and burn incense, which is the great honor of a priest's whole life and happens to a man once if it happens at all, and while he is in there, an angel is standing to the right of the altar.

And the first thing the angel says is not about God's plan or the future of the nation. It is this.

Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard.Luke 1:13

Sit with the tense of that.

Has been heard. Not I have now heard it. Not your prayer has finally reached the right desk. It is the grammar of something that happened and stands completed. Somewhere back down the years, that prayer was heard, and it has been in the state of having-been-heard ever since, through every year of nothing, including all the years he stopped saying it.

And we know he had stopped, because of what he says next. He argues. He asks how he can possibly know this, and he explains, to an angel, that he is an old man and his wife is getting on. A man does not argue with an answer to a prayer he is still praying. He argues with an answer to a prayer he had filed away as closed.

He was not standing in that holy place asking. He had come to do his duty on a day like any other, and it was into that ordinary shift, with no hope in it at all, that the answer arrived.

Now, I want to be careful with you, because this is the exact point where messages like this one usually overreach and do damage.

I am not telling you that what you took off your list is on its way. Nobody on this earth is authorized to tell you that, and I will not do it, and if I did you would be right not to trust me. Zechariah got a son. Plenty of faithful people have wanted the same and not received it, and they were not doing it wrong, and their prayers were not less heard.

What I am telling you is the thing you actually stopped believing, which is a different thing and a deeper one.

It was heard.

Not is being considered. Not will be looked at when the time is right. It was heard on the day you first said it, and it has been standing heard for every one of the years since, and your forgetting was never God's filing. You have been keeping a list. There is another record, older and better kept, and nothing has ever fallen off it. Not one line. Not the one you stopped writing down. Not the ones you were too tired to number.

And hear this clearly, because the silence has been teaching you something untrue: the delay is not a verdict on you. It is not a score. It does not mean you asked wrongly, or wanted the wrong thing, or lacked something that other people evidently had. That reading of the silence is not from God and you may put it down.

There is no timetable in this message and there will not be one. What there is, is a Person who heard you the first time, who has not lost the file, and who is not embarrassed by how long you have been standing there.