Nine Years and Three Doors

She started because of a leaflet, which she thinks is funny now.

Somebody put one through her door about praying for your street and Marcelle, who was forty-two and had time on Tuesdays, thought, why not, and wrote out the numbers of the houses on the back of an envelope and started at the top.

That was nine years ago and she has not stopped.

She has learned things. She knows which house has the man who does not sleep. She knows about the family at fourteen and the year they had. She has been in three of those houses and taken food into two and sat with somebody for a whole afternoon at the far end when their mother was dying.

She would tell you the praying has changed her more than it has changed the street, and she means that generously and she does mean it.

But there are three doors.

Three houses that have never once opened in nine years. Not hostile. Two of them are perfectly pleasant on the pavement. It is simply that they are exactly as they were in the first month, and Marcelle prays for those three by number every Tuesday and has done more than four hundred times.

And in the summer she caught herself doing something she has never done before.

She skipped one.

Not deliberately, not out of anger. She got to the number and something in her went past it and picked up the next one, and she noticed about ten seconds later, and she stopped and went back and prayed for it properly.

But she has thought about that ten seconds ever since, because she knows what it was.

It was the first arrival of a thought she has been keeping out for nine years, and the thought is: this one is not going to happen, and I am tired of asking.

She is fifty-one. She has no complaint against God and she is not angry. She has just started, in a very small way, in one ten second gap on a Tuesday, to stop expecting.

And you may have your own three doors. Or one. And you may have had your own ten seconds and never told a living soul about it.

Jesus told the story specifically to guard against one thing

Take this off before we go a step further, because you have carried it since the summer and it was never yours.

You are not the reason those doors have not opened. You never were. Scripture never once puts the opening of a person in the hands of the one praying, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the persistence of your Tuesdays, who does anything at all inside another human being. Set that down here on the step. It is heavy and it has been getting heavier since June.

Now hear how Luke introduces the parable, because he tells you the purpose before he tells you the story.

Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up.Luke 18:1

He is guarding against one specific thing.

Not against unbelief in general. Not against asking for the wrong things. Against giving up, which is the particular danger that shows up in people who have been praying a long time and have not seen it.

Which means Jesus is not surprised by your ten seconds. He anticipated it. He built a whole parable around exactly the moment you had in June, and He built it not to scold anybody but to hold them.

You are inside that parable, on the right side of it. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who sustains a woman through four hundred Tuesdays, and He has never once graded a street by how many doors opened.

Now let me be careful, because there are ditches on both sides.

Nothing here says nine years of praying was wasted or that it should have produced something by now. It is not a mechanism, and God is not a lock that opens at a certain number of turns.

And nothing here promises you those three doors. I cannot promise that and I will not try. Nobody arranges another person's turning, nobody earns it, and nine years of nothing at three addresses is not a verdict on your praying or your street or you. Scripture never once makes it anybody's fault, and it is His Spirit who moves as He chooses in a house.

Here is the tender part, and I will say it warmly because you have earned warmth. The ten seconds was not the beginning of the end. It was tiredness, and tiredness at four hundred Tuesdays is not a character flaw, it is arithmetic.

You went back. That is the part you have not given yourself. You noticed and you went back and you prayed for it properly, and that is precisely the thing the parable exists to produce.

Scripture says always pray and do not give up, and His Spirit is the one who keeps a woman at it, and neither of them ever asked you to feel like it.