I Had Prayed With Real Confidence

Faisal has not offered to pray for anybody in five years and everybody thinks it is grief.

Some of it is. The man was his friend for nineteen years and there is no version of this where the grief is not part of it.

But it is not the reason, and Faisal knows the reason exactly, and has never said it.

He had been sure.

Not hopeful. Not resolute. Sure, in the way he has been sure perhaps three times in his life, and it arrived without being worked up and he did not manufacture it. He prayed with that in him, more than once, over about eleven weeks, and toward the end he told the man's wife something he has thought about every week since.

He did not promise. He was careful even then; he has always been careful. What he said was that he had a strong sense, and that he had been praying with unusual confidence.

She held on to that. Of course she did. And when it went the other way, she never once mentioned it to him, and has been nothing but kind, and that has been considerably worse than if she had.

Five years.

And what stops him now is not doubt about whether God heals. It is that he no longer trusts the thing in himself that felt like certainty, and he cannot tell the difference from inside, and the cost of being wrong is a woman's face at a funeral.

He is fifty-three.

You may know that silence.

Maybe you also had a confidence you did not manufacture. Maybe you also said something careful that somebody held on to. And maybe you have not offered since, and everybody has a different theory about why.

The half sentence nobody preaches

There is a line near the end of Paul's last letter, in among the practical notes about coats and books and people's travel, and it is one of the most quietly important sentences in the New Testament for a man in your position.

Erastus abode at Corinth: but Trophimus have I left at Miletum sick.2 Timothy 4:20

Trophimus have I left at Miletum sick.

Paul. The man through whom, Acts records, extraordinary things happened. Writing at the end of his life, mentioning in passing that he left a companion behind, ill, and went on.

And here is what is not in the sentence. No explanation. No note about why. No suggestion that something went wrong, that somebody lacked faith, that there was sin in the camp, that the timing was off, or that it would be understood later.

It is reported the way you would report the weather, in a list of ordinary logistics, by a man who is not embarrassed and does not think it requires comment.

Which tells you that in the actual apostolic experience, people stayed sick. Sometimes. Without an account. And it was not treated as a crisis requiring explanation, because the people who did this work knew that the outcome was never in their hands.

And people stayed sick in the apostolic record without any explanation attached. The written word mentions a companion left behind ill in a list of travel notes and never once accounts for it, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a man who has been silent for five years.

And you did not fail at something that was never yours to guarantee. The word puts the leaving-sick beside coats and books without embarrassment, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than requiring the outcome to be explained.

The confidence, and what it was

Now the thing you have never said, because it is the real difficulty and it deserves a straight answer rather than a comfort.

You had a confidence you did not manufacture, and the outcome did not match it.

I am not going to tell you it was not from God. I do not know, and neither does anybody, and a confident answer in either direction from a stranger would be worth nothing to you.

What I will say is that a confidence about a thing is not a promise of that thing, and the two feel almost identical from inside, and nobody ever teaches the difference until somebody has already been hurt by it.

That is why you were careful with her. You did not promise. Some part of you already knew the distinction even then, at the height of it, which is more than most people manage.

And you did not promise her anything and you were careful even then. The word says let your yea be yea, and you kept your speech accurate under pressure at the worst possible moment, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit about what you actually said in that room.

And nothing about you is under review for what you felt. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a man who has been carrying a woman's kindness as though it were an accusation.

Her kindness

One more, because it is the sharpest thing in your five years and you named it yourself.

She has never mentioned it and has been nothing but kind, and that has been worse.

Of course it has. An unspoken thing between two people is heavier than a spoken one, because the spoken one can be answered and the unspoken one is carried by both of them separately, and neither knows what the other is carrying.

You have assumed she is being gracious about a failure.

That is one possibility. Here is another, which is at least as likely and which you have not been able to consider from inside five years of silence: she may remember it as the thing that got her through eleven weeks, and may have no complaint at all, and may have said nothing because she does not think there is anything to forgive.

You do not know. And the not knowing is not resolvable by more thinking about it, and it has been running your ministry since.

And you are not required to carry a verdict she may never have passed. The word says charity thinketh no evil and hopeth all things, and it applies to what you assume about her as much as to what she assumes about you, and the Spirit is the one who lets a man stop constructing somebody else's opinion.