Eleven Words on a Tuesday

Six ten in the morning, the chair by the window, the tea already going cold on the sill because it always does, and the light on the building opposite arriving the way it arrives.

He said: God, it is me. I am still here. That is all.

And then he counted them. Not on purpose. His head simply did it, the way it does with the number of stairs and the number of tiles behind a sink, and it came out at eleven, and he sat there feeling small in a way that is hard to describe to anybody who has not felt it. Eleven words. That was the week.

There were nine years when he prayed like breathing. Not performance. Actual, hours, in the car, in a corridor, in a plastic chair that hurt his back at the level of the third rib and he could still tell you exactly where. Nine years of his wife being ill, and he prayed through every one of them, and he was not a hero about it and he never once thought about it as an achievement. It was simply what a man does with his hands when there is nothing else to do with them.

Then she died, and it stopped. Not a decision. He did not stand in a garden and renounce anything. He would have told you he intended to keep praying, and he did intend it, and then he found that the machinery had gone quiet. He would sit down to pray and there would be nothing there, not even resistance. Six years of that. Nothing came, and nothing came, and nothing came.

He did not stop believing. That is what people get wrong when he has tried to explain it, twice, badly. He believed the whole time. He just had nothing.

So this Tuesday there were eleven words, and he counted them, and then he was ashamed of counting them, and then he sat there with cold tea and thought the sentence he has thought every week for six years. If this is restoration it is the slowest thing I have ever been part of.

You have your own Tuesday. Maybe yours was four words in a parking lot, or a sentence you started and did not finish, or the fact that you got as far as sitting down in the chair, which you have not done since spring. And you counted it too, and something in you filed it under not enough. You are measuring a stage against a finish line and you have been handed the wrong ruler. Ezekiel 37:8 is a verse about a moment when everything visible had happened and nothing was breathing yet, that is written down, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been sitting in that chair beside you at six ten in the morning for all six years without one word about the word count.

Nobody quotes verse eight

Everybody knows the valley of dry bones. Almost nobody quotes the part in the middle, and the part in the middle is the part you are living in.

Read the sequence. Ezekiel prophesies, and there is a noise, and then a rattling, and the bones come together, bone to its bone. Then sinews. Then flesh. Then skin over the top of all of it. A whole valley of complete bodies, lying there, assembled.

And I looked, and behold, there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them. But there was no breath in them.Ezekiel 37:8

Sit with that last clause for a second. This is not the beginning of the chapter and it is not the end. It is the middle, and in the middle there is a field of finished bodies and not one of them is breathing. If you had walked into that valley at that exact moment you would have said nothing is happening here, and you would have been looking at the most active thing God was doing on the earth that day.

Notice also what Ezekiel does about it: he writes it down. He does not skip it in the report to make the chapter read better. He says plainly that there was no breath in them, and that sentence has a verse number, and it has stood in Scripture for two and a half thousand years so that a man with cold tea at six ten in the morning could find out that his stage is in the text.

You are standing inside a stage that has a verse number, and it is not the stage of a person who failed. Ezekiel 37:8 says the assembling was real and the breath had not come, and both were true in the same field on the same day, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been doing the assembling in you during six years when there was nothing to hear.

Eleven words is not a small prayer, it is a prayer

Here is the honest part, and I am not going to trade it for encouragement.

Restored is not replaced. God is not going to hand you back the man you were in the third rib chair with his nine years and his hours. That man prayed the way a person prays who has something enormous to hold and adrenaline to hold it with, and you are not him and you are not going to be issued a copy of him. Restoration is not a duplicate of your best year. It is you, put back together, praying whatever you actually have, which this week was eleven words.

And I want to be exact about the word slow, because this category gets lied about more than any other. Slow is a speed. It is not a diagnosis and it is not a stall. Nothing in Ezekiel's valley moved fast, and nothing about the pace of it was a comment on the people in it.

You have a prayer life that is being rebuilt at a speed you did not set and are not required to raise. It is written in Isaiah 42:3 that He does not break a bruised reed or quench a smoldering wick, and it is the Holy Spirit who is tending a wick that is currently producing eleven words a week and no smoke worth mentioning.

And nothing here is going to tell you how to speed it up, because there is no lever and I am not going to invent one for you. The assembling in that valley was God's work and the breath was God's to command, and Ezekiel's whole part was to stand there and say what he was given to say. You are not the engine of this and you were never asked to be. Ezekiel 37:9 has the prophet commanded to speak to the breath and the breath coming from the four winds at God's own word, that is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the breathing part and always has.