One Line Of Her Prayer

The washing went up on the roof, because that is where the wind was.

Six flights, a metal door that had to be lifted and shoved at the same time, and then the whole city underneath you and four lines strung between two poles that somebody's husband had set in concrete before anybody could remember. Her grandmother went up there at first light with the basket on her hip, and she took the boy with her, and the boy sat on an upturned crate with the peg bag and handed pegs up one at a time.

And she prayed the entire time. Out loud. In her own language, in a voice she used for nothing else, not loud but not quiet either, while her hands went on doing the sheets.

She prayed for everybody. That was the shape of it. She went through the whole building, floor by floor, the woman on two whose son was in trouble, the couple on four who fought, the man who ran the bakery and had a bad hip and would not go to the doctor. Then the cousins, in three countries, by name, all of them, including the ones nobody spoke to. Then the country. Then the president, which the boy thought was hilarious.

It went on for twenty minutes. It went on until the basket was empty.

But she always started the same way. Every single morning, with the first wet sheet in her hands and her arms up over the line, before any of the names, she said one line first.

New every morning, Lord. So we begin again.

That was the doorway. Then the list.

The boy is forty-one now.

The building was sold. The roof is not accessible anymore, there is a code on the door and an aerial where the poles were. She has been gone eleven years. Half the language has gone with her, and he can follow a conversation but he cannot pray in it now, not properly, not the way you would need to. The rooms he prayed in after that are all closed to him too, for reasons that took years and cost him things he does not talk about.

He could once recite prayers he can no longer recite. He knew whole psalms in two languages. There were people he would have called first, and he does not call them now.

What is left is one line.

He says it in the car, mostly. On the days when the day is already bad before it starts, at a red light, out loud, in her voice more than his.

New every morning, Lord. So we begin again.

And every time, in the same breath, comes the thought that has been following him around for four years like a dog that will not go home. Is that it? Is that all I have got left? One line off the front of a prayer that used to last twenty minutes?

The book that was written in the rubble

I want to show you where your line comes from, because I do not think anybody has ever told you what neighborhood that sentence lives in.

Lamentations is five poems written by a man sitting in a ruin. Not a metaphor. The city is down, the walls are down, the temple is down, and he goes through the alphabet in order, one letter at a time, because grief with no shape at all cannot be carried and even a wrecked man needs somewhere to put his hands.

And in the exact middle of it, in the middle poem, in the middle verses, this comes up out of the rubble.

It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness. The LORD is my portion, saith my soul; therefore will I hope in him.Lamentations 3:22-24

Now hold on to two things about that, because both of them are for you.

The first is where it is. That sentence is not spoken from a rebuilt city. Nothing has been restored when he writes it. He is not looking at scaffolding and feeling hopeful. He is sitting in the actual ruin, and the book does not end with everything put back, and God let it into Scripture in that condition.

The second is that word portion. In the old law, when the land was divided up, every tribe got an allotment except one. The Levites got no field, no boundary stones, nothing you could walk the edge of, and what was written for them instead was that the LORD is their portion. The man in the rubble reaches for that exact word. He has nothing left with edges. So he says the oldest thing there is to say about having nothing: He is my portion.

You are standing on that this morning, at a red light, in a car, saying eight words in a voice that is half hers. That is not my encouragement to you, it is what Lamentations 3:24 says out loud. A sentence does not survive a burned city under its own power. His Spirit brought that one through the rubble, and He brought yours through eleven years.

So now the honest part, because this is where most writing about a small faith goes soft and starts lying kindly.

Nobody here is going to tell you that this is a phase. Nothing on this page says the twenty minutes are coming back, or that the language returns, or that the small thing in your mouth is a seed that becomes the tree you had. That is not a promise God made, and if I made it for Him and it did not happen you would be worse off than before you read this, and I would have done that to you.

Here is what is being said instead, and it is a different thing entirely.

A floor is not a seed. It is not smaller than a tree, it is a different object with a different job. Nobody stands in a kitchen wishing the floor would grow. It is already doing the only thing a floor was ever for.

You have a floor. His compassions fail not, they are new every morning, and that is written and it does not depend on how much of it you can still recite, and the Spirit who wrote it through a man in a ruin is holding it under you at this red light. Eight words are not the remains of your faith. Eight words are where your weight goes.

And look at what your one line actually contains, since you have been apologizing for it for four years. It names Him. It says something true about His character. It admits that the day needs beginning again, which is more honesty than most long prayers manage. And it moves. So we begin again is a sentence with feet in it.

Your grandmother put that line first for a reason, up there with the wind and the wet sheets. She did not build up to it at the end after twenty minutes of names, as though it were a conclusion she had earned. She stood on it before she started. It was the floor the whole rest of it was said on.

You still have the floor. Great is Thy faithfulness is what stands written directly beside it, and the breath on that sentence this morning is His Spirit's, exactly as it was in the rubble. You are standing on the same floor she stood on, and it is holding, and it does not care in the slightest that the building was sold.