Praying About It Had Become The Doing

She gets up before the house does. That has been true for twenty years and it is not discipline, it is preference; the quiet is the best part of her day and she would not give it up for anything.

She sits in the same chair with the blanket over her knees and the window going from black to gray, and she brings it to God.

The same thing. Every morning.

She brings it carefully, too. This is not a distracted woman rattling off a list. She has thought about it from four sides. She has asked for wisdom about the timing, and for a clear sense about the manner of it, and for the door to open, and for the door to close if it is not right, and she has meant every word of every one of those.

Eighteen months.

If you asked her what she is waiting for, she could not actually answer you in one sentence, and she would notice that, because she is an honest woman and honesty is the whole reason she gets up early.

The clear sense came, if she is truthful, sometime around the second spring. Not a voice. A settling, of the kind she has learned to recognize over a long life, where a thing stops moving in her and simply sits there being obviously true.

And she went on asking about it after that. Every morning. Carefully.

That is the part she has never looked at directly, because it looks so much like devotion that there is nothing in it for a conscience to catch on.

She is not avoiding God. She is with Him at six every morning, genuinely, and she loves it.

She has just found a way to be with Him about the thing instead of doing the thing, and eighteen months went past without one day that anybody, including her, could have called disobedient.

And you have something you keep bringing back. You would know it instantly if you named it. It is the one you have prayed about so many times that praying about it has become what you do with it.

He was told to stop crying out, and prayer was never the problem

There is a moment at the edge of a sea where a man is doing exactly what any of us would call the right thing, and God interrupts him.

Israel is trapped. Water in front, an army behind, and the people are terrified, and Moses is crying out to God. Of course he is. What else would a person do.

And this is the answer he gets.

The Lord said to Moses, "Why do you cry to me? Tell the people of Israel to go forward."Exodus 14:15

Now be careful with that line, because it has been used badly.

It is not a rebuke of prayer. This is the same man who spends forty days on a mountain and stands in a gap for a whole nation and is described as speaking with God face to face as a man speaks with his friend. Nobody is telling Moses to pray less.

What he is being told is that the answer has already been given, and it is behind him in the previous chapter, and the asking has arrived at a place where it is standing where the going should be.

You are not being corrected for praying, and nothing about your six o'clock chair is under suspicion, and it matters that you hear that before anything else. It is written that we are to pray without ceasing (1 Thessalonians 5:17), and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who helps us in our weakness and intercedes when we do not know what to ask (Romans 8:26), so the chair is not the problem and never was.

The problem is subtler and kinder than a fault.

There is a kind of asking that is genuinely seeking, and there is a kind that has quietly become a place to stand. The two look identical from outside and even from inside, and the only reliable way to tell them apart is the question of whether the thing has already been settled.

And you know whether it has. That is the uncomfortable mercy in this. A person always knows.

You have already received what you have been asking for, and it came a long time ago, and you are not waiting on God for anything in this matter. Scripture says His sheep hear His voice and follow (John 10:27), and it is the Holy Spirit who does that settling in a person, that quiet stopping of a thing in the middle of them, which is exactly what happened to you in the second spring.

Here is the tender part.

The reason a settled instruction gets brought back for eighteen months is almost never rebellion. It is that going forward means the asking stops, and the asking has been a warm room. It has been the place where the thing was held and turned over and kept safe, and where it could not go wrong yet, and there is a genuine loss in walking out of that room.

You are not being asked to give up the room, only to walk through it, because the One in the room is the One on the other side of the door. It is written that He goes before you and will be with you (Deuteronomy 31:8), and the Spirit who has met you at six every morning for twenty years does not stay behind in the chair when you stand up.

And the going forward itself.

Notice that the sea is still closed when the instruction comes. Nothing has opened. Moses is told to tell the people to move while the water is still water, and the opening happens in the moving, not before it.

You have a step available in a situation that has not changed yet, and the unchanged situation is not a closed door, it is simply where you are standing. Scripture says we walk by faith and not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7), and it is His Spirit rather than the visible conditions who tells a person the ground is there.