The Friend Who Prayed With Me

Six of them in a front room with the football on mute, because that is how men do this if they do it at all.

He had not planned to say anything. It came out of him about halfway through the evening, and once it was out it kept coming, and by the end of it he had told all six of them the whole thing, including the parts he had never told his wife.

And then Danny, who has been his friend since they were eleven, got up out of an armchair and put a hand on his shoulder, and the other four came over, and they prayed for him, badly and sincerely, for about four minutes, and one of them cried, which nobody mentioned afterward.

He was clear for seven weeks.

Then he was not, and he did not tell them, and the group carried on meeting for a while and he came less, and then he stopped coming, and then he stopped answering Danny's messages, which took about a year to become permanent.

Two years now.

Danny still texts on his birthday. Nothing pointed, nothing needy: a joke about their age and a photograph of something stupid. And he reads it and does not answer, and Danny does it again the next year, and that is the entire state of a thirty year friendship.

He would tell you, if you got him talking, that he is protecting Danny from having to deal with it. He believes that. It is not entirely a lie.

You may be protecting somebody. You may have gone quiet on the best person in your life and given the silence a noble name, and you may have been doing it for so long that the silence is now the relationship.

A man in chains says it out loud

Now let me give you a sentence from a man who had every possible reason to be ashamed in front of the people who had backed him, and notice how flatly he says it.

Paul is in prison. His converts are watching a man they staked their reputations on being treated as a criminal. Some of them have quietly distanced themselves and he names one or two of them elsewhere.

And he writes this to a young man who is watching it all happen.

For the which cause I also suffer these things: nevertheless I am not ashamed: for I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day.2 Timothy 1:12

You are not ashamed on the basis of who you know, and the safekeeping is His and not yours. 2 Timothy 1:12 puts the confidence on knowing and on His keeping while the man saying it is in chains, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been at that door for two years.

I know whom I have believed

Look at where the confidence sits. Not in his record, which at that moment looks like a failure to anybody scoring it from outside. Not in the outcome, which he has no control over. In who he knows.

And then the second half: he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him.

The word for keep there is a word for safekeeping, the way you would leave something valuable with somebody while you travel. Paul is saying: I handed something over, and the one I handed it to is able to hold it, and therefore what happens to my reputation in the meantime is not the material question.

You are not ashamed on the basis of who you know, and the safekeeping is His and not yours. 2 Timothy 1:12 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it out of a prison letter and puts it in a front room with the football on mute.

Now let me deal with the protection, because you believe it and I am going to be straight with you about it.

You are not protecting Danny. Danny is a grown man who got out of an armchair. He has demonstrated, at some social cost in a room full of men, that he is prepared to deal with it, and he has texted you every birthday for two years, which is a man knocking politely on a door he has been told nothing about.

What you are protecting is the version of yourself that existed in that room for seven weeks. As long as you say nothing, that version is the last one Danny has, and there is a kind of relief in that, and it is costing you the friendship.

You have been keeping a version of yourself alive at the cost of the man who prayed for it. Scripture puts the not being ashamed on knowing rather than on performing, and the Spirit of God has been at that door for two years while a text arrived once a year.

What the seven weeks were

And one more thing, because you have written them off and they should not be.

Seven weeks. You said in that room that you had never got past four days. Something happened after those men prayed, and it lasted seven weeks, and you have filed it under failure because of week eight.

That is not how anybody would score it if it were somebody else. If Danny had told you he had done seven weeks after a lifetime of four days, you would have known exactly what to say, and it would not have been a word about week eight.

You are looking at evidence of something begun and reading it as a verdict. His word says it and does not soften it, and that is the same confidence Paul is describing when he speaks of what is committed being kept, and His Spirit is the one who did it in a room with the football on mute.