My Mother Was Standing There

Nineteen years. She found out afterward, from an aunt, that it had been nineteen years, and that her mother had a name for it, which was the seven o'clock, because that is when she did it.

She had not asked her mother to pray. She had not, for most of those nineteen years, been the sort of daughter you could mention it to.

And then there was the winter when everything came apart and got put back together differently, and on a Sunday afternoon in her mother's kitchen she told her. All of it, the change and the reason for it, and what she had said to God and what she was promising Him, and her mother stood at the sink with a tea towel in her hand and did not say a single word for about a minute and a half, and then said: right.

That is all she said. Right.

That was five years ago. She has not kept it, and the not keeping was slow and unglamorous and she could not tell you a date.

And what she has done since is the thing this article is about. She still visits. Every three weeks or so, dutifully. She stands in the hallway with her coat on. She talks about the car and the weather and a cousin's business, and she leaves within the hour, and she has done this thirty or forty times now, and her mother has never once asked her anything.

Her mother is seventy nine.

You may be standing in a hallway with your coat on. And the person in the kitchen may have prayed you into whatever good thing happened to you, and you may have decided that keeping the coat on is a kindness to them.

The prayer that names the fear

Let me put you in front of a psalm, and I want you to notice that David asks for exactly the thing you are afraid of, which means he was afraid of it too.

O my God, I trust in thee: let me not be ashamed, let not mine enemies triumph over me. Yea, let none that wait on thee be ashamed: let them be ashamed which transgress without cause.Psalm 25:2-3

You are held inside a prayer that asks God directly that the ones who wait should not be ashamed. Psalm 25:3 widens from let me not to let none, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been in that kitchen at seven o'clock for nineteen years.

Let none that wait on thee

He starts with himself: let me not be ashamed. And then, in the very next breath, he widens it: let none that wait on thee be ashamed.

Now hold that phrase next to your mother's kitchen. Who in that house has been waiting on God?

Nineteen years at seven o'clock. That is what waiting on God looks like, and it looks like almost nothing from the outside, and it is the most thankless activity available to a human being, because there is nothing to show and no way to know.

And David's prayer, which is Scripture, which is a prayer God gave His people to pray, includes a specific request that people like your mother should not end up ashamed.

You are held inside a prayer that asks specifically that the ones who wait should not be put to shame. Psalm 25:3 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it out of a psalm of David and puts it in a hallway where a woman is standing in her coat.

Now let me say the hard thing gently, because it needs saying and nobody else will say it to you.

The coat is not a kindness. You believe it is. You believe that by keeping the visits short and light you are sparing your mother the disappointment of finding out.

But she is seventy nine, and she has prayed at seven o'clock for nineteen years, and she is not a woman who was ever going to be under any illusions about anybody. What she has now is not a preserved good impression. What she has is a daughter in a hallway for an hour every three weeks who will not sit down.

You have been sparing her something she never asked to be spared, at a cost she is paying every three weeks. Scripture puts the request about the waiting ones directly into the mouth of the one praying, and the Spirit of God has been in that kitchen at seven o'clock for a very long time.

What she was actually praying for

And here is the thing I want you to consider, and then I will leave it alone.

Nineteen years of prayer is not a nineteen year request for a particular outcome by a particular date. Nobody prays for nineteen years about an outcome; you cannot sustain it. What sustains that kind of praying is that the person becomes the subject rather than the request.

She was not praying for a version of you that behaves. She was praying for you.

Which means the thing you are protecting her from is a disappointment about an outcome she was not, by the end, primarily praying about. And the thing you are actually withholding from her is the subject of the prayer, sitting down, with the coat off.

You are the answer she was asking for and you have been standing in the hallway with it. His word says it and does not soften it, and that is the plain force of a psalm that asks God to keep the waiting ones from shame, and His Spirit is the one who has kept your standing settled through five years of one hour visits.