Lord, You Know, and I Do Not

The kettle has gone cold twice and she has not noticed either time.

It is ten past eleven and there are three lunchboxes open along the kitchen table like small hungry mouths. The cheese slices ran out on Tuesday and nobody replaced them, so it is going to be jam again for the middle one, who will mind, and who will say so at the door in the morning with his coat half on and his shoe untied.

While she butters, she prays. She has prayed the same prayer for six years.

Lord, You know.

That is the whole of it. She says it over the sink with her hands in the water. She says it on the bridge when the traffic stops and the wipers are going and she is late again. She says it in the doorway of the boys' room at night, watching the duvet rise and fall in the dark. Lord, You know.

And it is not a lazy prayer. Understand that first, because she has been told it was, once, by a woman at a Tuesday Bible study who meant nothing by it, and it went in like a splinter and stayed. It is not laziness. It is an entire theology folded down small enough to carry in one hand while the other one holds a laundry basket. He knows the situation. He knows her. He knows the thing she cannot get her mouth around at eleven at night, and because He knows it, she does not have to say it.

Then her daughter comes down for water.

Nine years old, bare feet on the cold floor, hair standing up on one side. She wants a cup and she wants something else as well, and it takes her a while to get to it, the way it always does with this one. There is a girl at school who has stopped sitting with her. Four days now. Would Mum pray about it.

So Mum puts the knife down and wipes her hands on the tea towel and lays one hand on the top of that warm head, and prays.

Lord, You know.

And her daughter waits. Waits the way children wait, holding her cup, with no tact in her at all.

Know what, though, she says.

And her mother opens her mouth and finds she is not certain how to finish that sentence out loud, in front of somebody, in words with edges on them.

Then the girl asks the second question, and it is the one that takes the floor out from under the evening.

What did He do the last time.

Here is the thing. It is not that God has never done anything for this family. She knows better than that, and so do you. It is that she is standing in her own kitchen at half past eleven, six years deep into Lord You know, and she cannot put one single item into her daughter's hands. Not a date. Not a week. Not one specific rescue with a shape she could describe. She has believed Him beautifully and generally, and general does not fit in a nine year old's cup.

That prayer is true. It is simply not a page.

I want to handle the first part gently, because the woman at the Bible study got it wrong and I am not about to repeat her.

Lord, You know is good theology. It is not small faith and it is not laziness. God does know. He searched her and knew her sitting down and rising up and understood her thought from far off, and there is no sentence any of us could build at eleven at night that would inform Him of anything He had not already handled. When she prays that, she is saying something entirely true.

There is only one trouble with it, and it is not a sin. It is true, and it never becomes a page. It goes up, and nothing comes down onto paper, and after six years she has a faith with an enormous heart and a vocabulary of one sentence, and no record underneath it at all. Then the hard season arrives and starts making its case, the way hard seasons do, and she reaches for something to answer it with and comes back holding a mood.

So hear this before we move one step further, because it is already true of you and it is not a standard you are walking toward. You are inside the mercies that Lamentations 3:22 says are the reason a person is not consumed, and you are inside them at this hour, tonight, without having produced a better prayer first. The Holy Spirit did not bring you to this page to shame your one sentence. He brought you here to put the second thing into your hand.

The verse where a man makes himself remember

Lamentations is a book about rubble. The city is down, the walls are down, and the man writing it spends twenty verses telling God exactly how it feels, in language nobody would be allowed to use in most prayer meetings. He does not tidy it. He does not spiritualize it.

And then, right in the middle of it, comes a hinge.

This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope. It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.Lamentations 3:21-23

Look at the order, because the order is the whole teaching. The recalling comes first. The hope comes after it, walking in behind like a second footstep. He does not wait until he feels hopeful and then find himself able to remember. He makes himself remember one particular thing on purpose, and hope arrives because the remembering went first.

And look at the word this. This I recall. Not everything. Not a general survey of the goodness of God across the history of the nation. One thing, deliberately brought up out of the rubble and set on the table where he can see it.

What he sets there is mercy, and mercy in that verse is covenant love, the loyal kind God swore and does not revise when the city falls down. Then the delivery schedule: new every morning. Not new in general. New on a morning, and a morning is a thing with a date on it. God has been arriving in your week in units you can count, and the only reason you cannot list them is that nobody in your house has been writing them down.

Making it specific is not doubting Him

Some of us keep the prayer vague on purpose, and it is worth saying why, because the reason is tender and not shameful.

If you never name it, you never have to watch a named thing go unanswered. Lord, You know is a sentence that cannot be disappointed. It has no edges, so nothing can chip it. That is not unbelief. That is a woman protecting her own heart with the only tool she had, and I am not going to take it off her roughly.

But look at how Jesus dealt with a man on the roadside outside Jericho, who was blind, and who was shouting. Everybody in that crowd could see what he needed. Jesus asked him anyway: what do you want me to do for you. He made a blind man say the obvious thing out loud, in words, in front of people. Naming it was not presumption and it was not doubt. Naming it was how the thing got edges, so it could be handed over, and so it could be told afterwards.

Right now, as you read, that same permission is over you. Scripture never once records God being offended by a specific request or a specific memory, and the Holy Spirit, who Jesus said would bring His words back to your remembrance, has been holding your particulars for you the entire six years.