Thirty Years of Praying for Him

She has the notebooks. Four of them, in the bottom of the closet, and the first one has a price sticker on it from a shop that closed a long time ago.

She did not set out to keep a record. She started writing his name at the top of a page because she was tired and she kept losing her place, and it turned into a thing she did most mornings for three decades. There are gaps. There is a stretch of nine months where the pages are blank and she remembers exactly why and does not talk about it.

Thirty one years, and he died in March, and she does not know.

That is the sentence. She does not know. He was not hostile about it, which somehow makes it harder. He would come to things. He came to her seventieth and sat and was pleasant to everybody. He would say, when she asked, that he was working on it, in a tone that closed the subject without any unkindness in it, and then he would ask about her knees.

Since the funeral she has been given a great deal of confident information by people who love her.

Two of them, at different times, have told her plainly that a person who never made a public profession has no grounds. One of them was gentle about it, which did not help. And three others have told her, with equal confidence and less evidence, that she will certainly see him, and one of those used the phrase deathbed and a knowing look, and she wanted to ask what she thought she knew and did not.

She is seventy three and she has been handed two verdicts by people who do not have the information.

Sit down. Nobody here is going to give you a third one.

What is actually written about who gets in

Start with the one sentence that keeps the door where God put it, because both of the verdicts handed to you in that front room moved it, and the Spirit did not license either move.

For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.Romans 10:13

Read the width of it. Everyone. There is no qualifying clause about the setting, the witnesses, the form of words, the tradition, or how long before the end it happened. The condition named is calling on the name of the Lord, and the promise attached to it is absolute.

Notice what the verse does not require. It does not require a public profession. It does not require anybody else to have been present. It does not say a word about a card, a walk to the front, or a form.

Which is why the first verdict you were given was an addition. Somebody took a real thing, which is that faith normally shows, and turned it into a requirement Scripture does not state, and then applied it to a man they had not been given the information about.

You are not obliged to accept a rule God did not make. What is written names one condition and no others, and the Spirit who inspired Romans 10:13 chose the word everyone deliberately.

Why nobody can tell you the other thing either

Now the second group, who were kinder and who are also not in a position to say it.

They mean well and it costs them nothing. A confident sentence about a deathbed makes a room feel better for an evening and it hands you something that will fail in about eighteen months, on a bad night, when you notice that the person who said it had no more idea than you do.

The problem with a false comfort is not that it is dishonest. It is that it does not hold, and when it gives way it takes some of your confidence in the true things with it.

So this page will not do it. Your son's standing is not something anybody on earth was given to report, and Scripture is careful in exactly this place, and the Spirit did not put a chapter in the book that lets a neighbor rule on a stranger.

What can be said is this, and it is not nothing. Nobody who called was ever turned away. That is stated positively, repeatedly, and without exceptions listed, and there is not one account anywhere in the record of somebody reaching for God and being refused.

You are holding a promise that nobody in that front room is authorized to shrink. Romans 10:13 is the width God chose, and the Spirit inspired the word everyone rather than a narrower one, which means the confident sentences on both sides were additions rather than readings.

What the notebooks were

Here is the part that has been quietly frightening, and it should be answered directly.

You are wondering whether thirty one years of praying went nowhere. Whether the four notebooks in the closet were, in the end, a woman talking to a ceiling.

They were not. Prayer is not a mechanism where the outcome tells you whether the machine was working. Every one of those mornings was heard when it happened. What is written about God receiving the prayers of His people does not come with a clause saying that they are retrospectively voided by a result you cannot see, and the Spirit is described as carrying prayers that the person praying could not even put into words.

And there is something else about those nine blank months. You know why they are blank. Those are in the record too, and God is not going through the notebook marking the gaps.

The notebooks were thirty one years of a mother refusing to stop bringing her son to God. Whatever happened in March, that stands, and it is not diminished by not being able to see the end of it.

You are a woman who did not stop. That is what those four books are, and nothing written anywhere makes the value of a prayer depend on the praying person being shown the outcome, and the Spirit who carried every one of those mornings is the same Spirit sitting with you now that they have stopped.