The Prayer I Prayed Over a Blanket

You remember the blanket better than you remember the room.

Yellow, with the edge gone soft where it had been washed too many times before he ever got to it, because it had been your sister's boy's first. Three days old. Both of you home. Your mother had gone and the house had that ringing quiet a house gets when everybody who was helping has left.

You stood over him and you said it out loud. Not a nice prayer. You had not slept and you had nothing arranged. You said, Lord, he is Yours, and You keep him, and let him know You.

Twenty-four years ago.

He is a good man. That is the thing that confuses people when you try to explain it. He works, he rings you on Sundays, he came and put your fence back up in March without being asked and would not take anything for it.

And there is a door in him that is shut on this one subject, and it has been shut for about eleven years, and you know exactly how it shuts because you have watched his face do it at your own table.

You have stopped mentioning it. Not out of fear, out of love, because the last two times cost the afternoon and you would rather have your son.

So you pray it quietly instead. Same prayer, more or less, twenty-four years on. And lately a question has started coming with it, at about four in the morning, which is where that question always comes: what actually happened to what I said over that blanket.

Paul splits the job into three and gives you one of them

There is a passage where Paul settles an argument about which minister mattered, and in settling it he hands every praying mother the same relief.

I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase. So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase.1 Corinthians 3:6-7

Three jobs. Planting, watering, increase. Two of them are human and the third one is not, and Paul is emphatic to the point of bluntness: the ones doing the human half are not anything.

That is not an insult. It is a release.

You planted. Over a yellow blanket, in a ringing quiet house, at three days old. You have watered for twenty-four years with Sunday phone calls and a fence that got mended and a mouth you have kept closed on purpose out of love.

The increase was never in your hands and it is not in his either. You have already done the whole of your part. I am not putting my own opinion over you here. Scripture says neither he that plants nor he that waters is anything, but God that gives the increase, 1 Corinthians 3:7, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a rest rather than a demotion.

Nothing here blames you and nothing here blames him

Let me be plain, because you have probably heard things.

Nobody prayed the wrong prayer, and Scripture never grades one, Romans 8:26, and the Holy Spirit is described there as the one who carries a prayer a person could not even word. There is no phrase you should have used, no consistency you failed at, no household rule that would have held the door open. Anyone who has implied to you that a child's faith is a report card on a mother was speaking outside Scripture and outside their authority.

And I am not going to hand you a diagnosis of your son either. He is a grown man with his own account before God, and this page is not a place to take him apart.

You are not under a judgement, and neither is he. Scripture says the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, nor the father the iniquity of the son, Ezekiel 18:20, and the Holy Spirit does not run a scoreboard between a mother and a twenty-four year old.

What a shut door is and is not

Eleven years of a closed subject teaches a woman a false lesson if she is not careful.

It teaches that the prayer failed. That is the sentence that arrives at four in the morning, and it comes dressed as realism, and it is not realism, it is arithmetic done on evidence you do not have.

You cannot see inside your son. Nobody can. What you can see is a face at a table and a subject that goes quiet, and neither of those is a report on what God is doing where nobody is looking.

You are not watching a finished thing. Scripture says God's word does not return unto Him void, but accomplishes that which He pleases, Isaiah 55:11, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps working in a life long after the person in it has stopped discussing the subject at Sunday lunch.

I am not promising you an outcome. I do not know what your son does and neither does anybody else on this earth. What I am telling you is that a closed subject is not evidence of an empty life, and that the two have never once been the same thing.

The mouth you have kept closed is not cowardice

There is one more thing under all of it, and it deserves saying, because Scripture treats timing as part of wisdom, Ecclesiastes 3:7, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been telling you when to keep quiet.

You have wondered whether keeping quiet is a failure of nerve. Whether a bolder woman would say it anyway and take the afternoon.

It is not cowardice. It is wisdom, and it is love, and there is a whole book in Scripture about the right word at the right time. Choosing your son over your point is not a compromise, it is the fear of God working in a woman who has already learned what the other way costs.

You have been ministering to that man for eleven years without saying one word about it. Scripture says a word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver, Proverbs 25:11, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells a mother when to speak and when a mended fence in March says more than a sentence would.