The Night We All Prayed

Every article on this site starts here and I am not going to shorten it. This is not medicine. I am not a clinician, nothing on this page is treatment, and nothing I write ever stands in the place of a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist. If anybody in that house is unwell, ring somebody qualified today, and do that before you read any further.

Now. There was a night and you have not talked about it since.

A room full of people. Some of them you barely knew. They put their hands on you or they stood in a circle round you, and somebody prayed with real conviction, and there was a moment in the middle of it where the air in that room genuinely changed.

And then it ended, and people were kind, and somebody made tea, and you got up the same.

And what has happened since is that you have quietly stopped going. Not dramatically. You have been busy on the relevant evenings. And the reason is not that you are angry with them, it is that you cannot work out what your face is supposed to do when you see them, and every possible version of that conversation is unbearable.

They said the second half out loud before anything happened

There is a sentence in Daniel spoken by three men in front of a furnace, and it is the sentence almost nobody quotes.

But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up. (Daniel 3:18, King James Version)

But if not.

They had just said that God was able to deliver them. And then, in the same breath, without dropping their voices, they said the other half out loud: and if He does not, our position is unchanged.

That is not doubt. Read the whole speech and there is no doubt anywhere in it. It is the most confident thing in the chapter, and the confidence includes the possibility that the thing they asked for does not happen.

You are standing exactly where those three men stood, and the standing has never once been a failure of faith. Daniel 3:18 has the but if not said out loud, in public, by men who were entirely certain of God, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets somebody hold both halves at once without breaking.

And notice they said it before. Not afterwards, as an excuse. Before, as part of the position. Which tells you the but if not was never a retreat.

You have never once been required to leave that possibility unspoken. The Spirit of God is the one who gives a person permission to say the second half out loud, and it is written that the men who said it were the same men who said He was able, in one continuous sentence.

What that room actually thinks

Let me say the practical half, because the story that gets built about those people is almost certainly wrong.

You think they are disappointed. Or that they have concluded something about you, and that the word faith is somewhere in the conclusion.

Here is what is far more likely, and I say it having been in a lot of those rooms. They have been avoiding you for exactly the same reason you have been avoiding them. They do not know what to say either. They prayed with everything they had and nothing visible happened, and every one of them has been privately turning that over and saying nothing about it.

You are on one side of a silence that has two frightened ends to it. Daniel 3:18 puts the unresolved possibility into the open air rather than leaving it to be handled privately, and the Holy Spirit is the one who ends a standoff nobody meant to start.

And I will say the thing this site exists to say, plainly. Nothing that happened or did not happen in that room was about the amount of anybody's faith. Not yours, not theirs. That whole idea belongs nowhere near a page I write.

You were never carrying the weight of the outcome, and the burden has never once been on the person being prayed for. The Spirit of God is the one who takes a false accounting off a room full of people, and what is written has three men state plainly that the outcome does not determine their position.

The plain routing, which did not stop being true that night

Here is the part of this page that is not comfort, and it needs saying on an article like this one especially.

If something is happening right now that frightens you, that is 911, and nothing about that night changes it. If the heavy thing today is in your own mind, 988 answers, and a real person picks up. And whatever you were prayed for about goes to a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist today, and that is not a contradiction of anything that happened in that room.

You are permitted to be prayed for and to ring somebody in the same week. Daniel 3:18 has men entirely confident in God while facing a situation that was still completely live, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a prayer meeting from becoming a reason to skip a phone call.

I want that understood clearly. Making the appointment is not a vote of no confidence in what happened that night. It never was.

You have a call in front of you that has never once been in competition with a prayer. The Spirit of God is the one who is present in a clinic and in a circle of people, and what is written puts the confidence and the unresolved outcome inside one sentence spoken by the same men.