I Prayed Where People Could Hear Me

Marcelle asked out loud, in front of about ninety people, and it did not come.

She would want me to say what it was and I am not going to, because the specifics belong to somebody else's family and because you have your own and yours is not hers.

What matters is the shape of it. She led that prayer. She stood up in a room where everybody knew her and she asked God for a thing, plainly, by name, without hedging, and she meant every word.

She was not being presumptuous. This is important and I am going to keep saying it. She did not promise anybody an outcome. She did not tell that family what God was going to do. She asked, at full size, the way a person asks when they actually believe somebody is listening.

The room was with her. Some of them were praying for weeks.

And it did not come.

Nobody said anything to her. That is the strange part. There was no accusation and nobody looked at her differently and one man went out of his way to thank her about a month later.

What happened is entirely inside her.

She has been leading prayer for eleven years and she is good at it and she still does it, every week.

And about seven months after that, she noticed something in her own mouth.

She had started praying smaller.

Not less. Not less often, and not with less warmth. Smaller. She asks God to be near people. She asks Him to give strength and comfort and wisdom, and all of those are real and biblical and none of them can be publicly disproved.

She has not asked, out loud, in front of a room, for a specific thing to happen, in seven months.

She caught it in a car park after a Tuesday evening and sat in the car and said, out loud, "I am protecting myself."

Now let me ask you when you started making them smaller.

Because if this is yours you did, and there was no decision, and you would not have noticed it except that one day you heard yourself hedging and knew exactly why.

Three times

Paul asks for something three times and does not get it, and he writes it down.

Concerning this I implored the Lord three times that it might leave me. And He has said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness."2 Corinthians 12:8 to 9

Notice what kind of asking this is.

Implored. Three times, counted. This is not a man muttering about it. He named it, specifically, more than once, to God, and he is telling a whole church that he did.

And it did not leave him.

Now here is the detail I want you to hold, because it is doing more work than people realize.

Paul never tells us what it was.

Two thousand years of guessing. His eyes, a person, a recurring illness, opposition. He does not say. The most autobiographical writer in the New Testament, in the middle of the most personal passage he ever wrote, and the thing itself is not disclosed.

And what he does say about why it was there, he says about himself, in the first person, about his own body. That is his to say. It is not a template that anybody gets to lay over your Tuesday, and this article is not going to do that to you.

What he was given was not an explanation of the thorn. It was a sentence about God: My grace is sufficient for you.

So hear this said over you, sitting in a car park having just heard yourself hedge. You did not fail in that room and neither did anybody in it, and asking at full size for a specific thing is exactly what Paul did three times over about a thing he never got. That is written in his own account in his own letter, and it is the Holy Spirit who helps in our weakness and intercedes for us, and He was in every word of that prayer and He is in the smaller ones too.

Now let me deal with the thing under this, because if I leave it there it will grow back.

Nobody in that room lacked faith.

I want that said flatly, because the sentence that gets whispered in these situations is that somebody did not believe hard enough, and it is a lie, and it does damage that lasts for decades. This site does not allow it in any form. Not about you, not about that family, not about the ninety.

The burden for what God does was never on the intensity of the asking. If it were, prayer would be a machine and God would be a mechanism, and Paul, who had raised a man from the dead in a room, asked three times about his own body and was told no.

And here is the second thing, which is the one that is actually costing you.

You have started managing your own reputation in prayer.

Not consciously. What happened is that a public ask has a public result, and a public no felt like a public failure, and something in you moved to a position where you cannot be seen to fail again. Comfort and strength and nearness are always granted. Nobody can ever tell whether that prayer was answered.

That is not humility. It is a shield, and it is between you and the room and also between you and God.

The word says we have not because we ask not, and it says come boldly to the throne of grace, which is language about walking in like you belong there. And the Spirit of God is the one who intercedes for the saints according to the will of God, which means the outcome was never sitting on your shoulders in the first place, and that is precisely why you are free to ask big.

He is working in this. You have not been shown what He is doing, and that family has not, and neither has the man who thanked you a month later.

Both of those are true and you are allowed to ask again tomorrow at full size.