The Eleven Words He Prayed

The van dies on a county road in February with forty minutes of daylight left and the nearest anything about eleven miles behind them.

Margie calls it in. The dispatcher says ninety minutes, maybe a bit more, and to keep the hazards going.

So there they are. Her and Dennis. Ninety minutes.

She has worked in the same building as Dennis for eleven years and has not once had a conversation with him she would call a conversation.

In 2019 he said something in the break room. She is not going to tell you what it was, and I am not going to write it down here either, because the second it goes on the page half of you take one side and the other half take the other side and the entire point of this is gone. It was not vicious. It was not stupid. It was a thing that people who love God have disagreed about for a very long time, and Dennis held one end of it and Margie holds the other, and she heard him say it with her paper plate in her hand and she filed him.

That is the honest word for it. Filed. Not fought, not confronted, not even disliked much. Just moved into a drawer marked not really.

Six years of hello in the corridor.

Now it is ten past nine at night and the heater is off because the engine is off and they can see their own breath, and Dennis's phone lights up on the dash.

He looks at it and something goes out of his face.

He takes it. He says almost nothing. He says, "Okay. Okay, sweetheart. No, that is not on you. Put your mom on."

The call lasts about three minutes. Then he sets the phone down on his knee, face up, and it goes dark in the cold, and he does not say anything for a while.

Margie asks if everything is all right. He says it is his daughter and it is not all right and he would rather not.

And then Dennis puts one hand flat over his eyes, the way a man does when he does not want a colleague to see his face, and out loud, not to Margie, plainly, in the dark of a stopped van, he says:

"Lord, I believe. Help me with the part I do not."

Eleven words.

They are Margie's words.

They are the exact eleven words she has said standing at her own kitchen sink since she was twenty-six years old, the ones she has never said in front of another human being, the ones she said the night before her mother's funeral and the night her son got his license and the night she nearly did not go back to work.

Word for word. Same order. Same place where the breath goes.

She sits there in a cold van on a county road and looks straight ahead at the dark, because she has apparently been standing right next to somebody for eleven years.

What was under both of them the whole time

I want to be very clear about something before I go one line further, because this is the place where an article like this usually cheats.

I am not telling you the thing you disagreed about does not matter.

That would be its own verdict, handed down by a stranger who was not in the break room, and it would be a lie besides. Some of those questions matter a great deal. People have spent whole lives on them in good conscience, and the fact that Margie and Dennis are on opposite ends of one is not a misunderstanding to be cleared up in eleven hundred words by me.

Nobody here is asking you to call it unimportant. Nobody here is asking you to move an inch on it. Keep your end of the rope.

I am pointing at something else entirely, and Paul points at it first, in a letter written to people who could not agree about anything.

Wherefore I give you to understand, that no man speaking by the Spirit of God calleth Jesus accursed: and that no man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost.1 Corinthians 12:3

Read what he is doing there. He is about to spend a whole chapter on difference. Different gifts, different services, different workings, a body full of parts that are not each other and are not supposed to be.

And before he says one word about the differences, he lays down the floor they are all standing on.

Nobody says it but by the Spirit.

Which means when Dennis put his hand over his eyes in a cold van and spoke to the Lord, something was happening in that van that Margie did not authorize and could not have faked and did not get a vote on. The Holy Spirit was in a stopped vehicle on a county road, doing in a man she had filed exactly what He has been doing in her at a kitchen sink since she was twenty-six.

And that is true about you and somebody, right now, whether or not you ever end up in a broken-down van with them. You are not the last one holding this. Scripture says in 1 Corinthians 12:3 that the confession itself is the Spirit's work, so every place that confession is being made is a place He is working, and His Spirit has been at it in rooms you never counted and in people you long ago stopped counting.

Now, the thing about a file.

A file is not hatred. That is what makes it so easy to keep. Margie never said one unkind word about Dennis in eleven years. She just quietly stopped expecting anything from him, and a person can carry a drawer like that for decades without ever once feeling like they are doing something wrong.

What it costs is not obvious either, which is the other reason it survives. It does not cost you an argument. It costs you company. You go around feeling like the last person on earth who prays the way you pray, and the reason is not that there is nobody, it is that you have already ruled out the ones there are.

Hear this straight, because it is not a suggestion: you are already in company. His word calls the whole thing one body and one Spirit, and that was written down by the Holy Spirit and it did not become less true while you were keeping your drawer. You have people. You have had people the whole time.

And nobody here will tell you that filing Dennis was a sin you have to go and dig up and grovel over, because that is not what this is. It was a small human economy. You had a limited amount of attention and a real disagreement and you did what people do.

What I am telling you is that it is costing you something you cannot afford right now, which is knowing that there is company out here.

Here is the last thing, and it is the part Margie could not stop thinking about on the tow ride home.

The eleven words were not a doctrine. They were a man at the end of himself asking God for help with the exact place he was weakest, and he said them in the open, in front of somebody he had every reason to keep his guard up around.

You have said those words too. Maybe not those eleven, but yours, whatever they are, in the same voice, at the same hour of the same kind of night. That is written into how God actually deals with people, and the Spirit who met you at your sink is not a different Spirit in another kitchen across town.