The prayer list

"Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words." — Romans 8:26

I keep a list in the back of my journal of the people I am praying for. It is not organized. It is not neat. Some of the names have been there so long the ink has faded and I have written over them, and some were added last week. There is no system to it. A name goes on the list when it comes to me, and it stays on the list until something in me says it is finished, and I cannot explain what that something is or when it comes.

Edna has been on the list since March, when she stopped coming to church without telling anyone why. She is not someone who misses church. She has been in the third pew, left side, for longer than I have been at Trinity, and when she stopped coming I noticed it the way you notice a piece of furniture that has been moved out of a room. The room is not wrong. The room is different, and you cannot stop looking at where the thing used to be.

I do not know what happened. I have called her twice and she was polite and brief and did not say. I am not the kind of person who pushes, though I have thought about it. Some people need to be pushed and some people need to be left alone and I do not always know which kind a person is until I have done the wrong one.

So I pray for her. I pray for her in the morning at the kitchen table, when I go through the list, and the praying is not asking God to fix whatever is broken. I do not know what is broken. The praying is more like holding a door open. I am holding the door open on Edna's side and I am not going through it and I am not calling through it. I am holding it. That is all.

There are other names on the list. Some of them I have been carrying for years. A woman from church whose husband is in a facility now and she drives to see him every day and he does not know who she is. A family I heard about through the prayer chain whose son is in trouble and the trouble is the kind that does not have a clean ending. A man I taught thirty years ago who has cancer and whose mother asked me to pray for him, and I said I would, and I have, every morning since September.

I do not know if the list does anything. I do not know if the names on it are changed by my saying them in the dark at the kitchen table before the sun is up. I have come to think that the list is not for them. The list is for me. The list is the way I carry people I cannot help in any other way, and the carrying is the prayer, and the prayer is enough for this morning.

Ruby keeps a collection of prayers at her kitchen table. You can find them here.