The Prayer They Keep Praying

The good plates come out on Sunday. They have a gold rim that has worn thin on two of them from the dishwasher, and everybody knows which two, and everybody quietly takes those two so the guests get the good ones. That is the kind of house it is.

Desmond gets there first because getting there takes him longer. Forty minutes to shower and dress, a ramp his brother built out of pressure treated lumber that has gone silver in the weather, the transfer into the car, the transfer out. He is at the table before the rice is done. His niece is under the table with a coloring book and a fistful of crayons, narrating.

His legs have not held his weight in four years. There was a fall, and then a diagnosis, and then a long argument with his own body that he lost in stages, which is how these arguments are actually lost. Not in one afternoon. In stages, with a plateau between each one that felt like the end of it.

The rice comes out. The greens come out. His mother-in-law puts a hand on the back of his chair, which is her way of saying she is glad he came, because she is not a woman who says it.

Then Uncle Ray prays. He always prays. He has a voice for it, and he uses the old words, and halfway through he says what he says every single week.

And Lord, we thank You in advance, because we know You are going to stand this boy up on his own two feet and walk him right through that front door.

Amen goes around the table like a wave. His niece says it too, from under the table, on a beat behind everybody.

And Desmond says amen. He does. He means the amen as a yes to the God being spoken to, and he does not mean it as a yes to the sentence. He stopped praying that particular prayer two years ago, on a Tuesday, in a parking lot, alone, and he has never once told anyone in that room, because he loves every one of them and because he knows exactly what it would do to Uncle Ray's face.

So he sits there. He eats the greens. He is the most loved man in that house and the loneliest one at the table, and both are true at the same time, and nobody knows.

If that is your Sunday, then hear me, because I am not going to ask you to pick a side. You are not in rebellion, and you are not in unbelief, and it is written in 2 Corinthians 4:16 that a real renewal is going on inside you day by day, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been doing it in you through every one of those amens you could not fully mean.

Paul puts two sentences side by side and refuses to choose

I want to show you a verse that most people have heard and almost nobody has been taught properly, because the second half is quoted constantly and the first half gets swallowed.

For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.2 Corinthians 4:16

Look at the word Paul chose for the body. Perish. Not struggle, not decline, not go through a hard patch. Perish. And he wrote it in the present tense, as something happening now and continuing.

He is not being dramatic. He is being accurate, and he is being accurate about himself, at the same desk and in the same breath as the renewal. He does not say the outward will hold up if the inward is strong. He does not say the perishing is an illusion the properly spiritual can see through. He states it as fact, and then he puts a yet in the middle and states a second fact.

Two clauses. One sentence. Neither one cancels the other.

This is one of the very few places in all of human speech where you are permitted to say both things and not be accused of contradicting yourself. Everywhere else you are pushed to a verdict. Either it is fine or it is a tragedy. Either you have faith or you are honest. Paul refuses that whole way of counting.

You are allowed to hold both true sentences at once, because it is written in 2 Corinthians 4:16 that the perishing and the renewing run on the same day in the same person, and the same Spirit who is doing the renewing is the One who has kept you from having to lie about the perishing.

That is not a coping strategy. That is the doctrine, stated plainly by a man who had been beaten with rods three times and was writing about his own body when he wrote it.

About Uncle Ray, and about the prayer you stopped praying

Now I have to say something about the people at that table, and I am going to say it carefully, because it would be very easy to be cruel here and cruelty would cost you the family you actually have.

Uncle Ray is not the problem. Uncle Ray is love with its hands open. He is asking heaven for the thing he wants most for a man he loves, and he is asking loudly, in front of everyone, on the record, every week. That is not superstition. God heals bodies, and He has not stopped, and I have no argument with a single word Uncle Ray said, and neither should you.

What is also true is that you cannot pray that prayer right now, and that is not a spiritual failure. Nobody is grading you. There is no ledger anywhere in Scripture where a person's healing is held up pending their enthusiasm, and if anyone has suggested to you that the delay sits at your feet, they were wrong, and the wrongness of it does not become right for being said gently.

Two people can sit at one table asking for two different things and both be honest before God. Uncle Ray is asking Him to change the body. You are asking Him to hold the person. Neither of you is the unbelieving one.

And now the distinction this whole site stands on, which I want you to have in words you can carry out of the room. He is not offering you a second body with your name in it. He is not handing you a copy of the life you had and asking you to accept the swap. He is repairing a person, and a person is a great deal more than a pair of legs, and repair on the original is what the word restoration has always meant.

You have a renewal going on in you that has never once paused to wait for your legs, and 2 Corinthians 4:16 puts it in the present tense on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is the One carrying it forward in you on the days you feel it and the days you do not.

Whether He restores what was taken from your body is His, and this page is not going to predict it for you. What I will tell you is what is written, and what is written is that the inward work is happening now.