The Offer That Got Awkward

Ross said eight words and the temperature of the conversation changed and he has not said them since.

It was a man at work, four years ago, who had mentioned something about a hospital appointment in the way people do at a coffee machine, not asking for anything.

And Ross said: would you mind if I prayed for that?

He meant it kindly and he said it well and it was not a strange thing to say between two men who had known each other eleven years.

And the man said oh and then said sure, yeah, thanks, and then there was about a second and a half of nothing, and then he said something about a meeting and went, and it was completely fine and Ross has thought about it perhaps three hundred times.

Nothing bad happened. That is what makes it hard to describe. Nobody was offended, nobody said anything, and they are still perfectly friendly and it never came up again.

But something in the room shifted for a second and a half, and Ross felt it, and he has spent four years making sure it does not happen again.

He is fifty-one. And what he does now, and he knows he does it, is that when somebody mentions something, he says the sympathetic thing and then moves the conversation on slightly faster than he needs to. He has become good at it. It looks like tact.

You may know that second and a half.

Maybe you also offered once. Maybe nothing bad happened. And maybe you have been steering conversations away from it ever since and calling it not wanting to impose.

The direction in James

There is an instruction in James about this, and the striking thing is which way round it runs.

Is any sick among you? let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him.James 5:14

Let him call.

The sick person does the calling. The instruction is addressed to the one who is unwell, and the elders are described as responding rather than initiating, and the whole procedure begins with somebody asking.

Which is the opposite direction from the one you have been operating in for four years, and the opposite direction from the one that produced the second and a half at the coffee machine.

Now, I am not going to turn that into a rule that nobody may ever offer. That would be its own distortion and there is plenty in Scripture of people praying for others unasked.

What it does establish is that the normal shape has the asking coming from the person who needs it, which means your friend at the coffee machine had not asked, and the awkwardness you felt was a perfectly ordinary consequence of a good thing being offered slightly outside the shape it usually comes in.

Not a rebuke. Not a sign you are bad at this. A shape.

And the awkwardness was about a shape rather than about you. The written word puts the calling in the mouth of the one who is sick and the responding in the hands of the others, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a man who has replayed eight words three hundred times.

And you did not do anything wrong at that coffee machine. The word records people praying for others both asked and unasked and never once treats an unasked offer as an offense, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than confirming a verdict a second and a half handed down.

What the second and a half actually was

Let me say plainly what happened in that moment, because you have never had it described and have therefore had to guess for four years.

Your friend was asked, without warning, to have an opinion about prayer in front of somebody at work.

That is the whole of it. He was not offended and he was not embarrassed by you. He was performing a small unexpected social calculation at a coffee machine, in about a second, with no preparation, and the pause was the calculation.

You have read that pause as a judgement on you. It was almost certainly a man deciding what his face should do.

And you have been reading a pause as a verdict for four years. The word says charity thinketh no evil, and it applies to what you conclude about him quite as much as to what he thought of you, and the Spirit is the one who lets a man stop assigning himself somebody else's reaction.

And nothing about you is under review for eight kind words. 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 become skilled at moving conversations on.

What is available now

Two things, and neither is a rule about offering.

The first is that you can say the thing that is true without asking anybody to decide anything. I will be thinking of you is not that. But I will pray for that is a statement of what you intend to do rather than a request for permission, and it does not put a man at a coffee machine in the position of having to answer.

That difference is very small and it removes the entire mechanism that produced your second and a half.

The second is that James's shape is available to be built rather than only waited for. People call for the elders in a church where it is known that this is a thing that happens. If nobody in your world knows you would, then nobody will ever ask, and four years of tact has made quite sure of that.

And you are able to say what you will do without requiring anybody to respond. The word has Paul telling people he prays for them constantly, as information rather than as a proposal, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a usable form for a man at a coffee machine.