I Am The One Who Still Asks Every Week

She can hear it now, in the two seconds after she finishes. A very small settling of the room. Nothing rude. Nothing said.

She still asks. Out loud, most weeks, in the same plain words, for the same thing, in a room that stopped using those words about eleven years ago.

Nobody has ever asked her to stop. They are good people and they would be appalled to know she can feel it. But she can feel it, and what she feels is a kind of gentle bracing, the way a family braces for the relative who is going to bring up the same subject at every meal, affectionately and with love and with absolutely no expectation that anything will change.

She has become the awkwardness. She knows it. And she has not stopped, which means she now walks into that building every week knowing exactly what her presence costs the atmosphere, and asks anyway, and goes home and wonders whether that is faithfulness or whether it is a woman who cannot read a room.

If you are the one who still asks, come in and sit down. Not one person in that room is going to be criticized here.

The awkwardness is not a verdict

Let us look at the evidence she has been reading, because she has been reading it as a ruling and it is not one.

What she detects in those two seconds is genuine. A room that has stopped expecting something does settle when somebody asks for it, and she is not imagining that and she is not being oversensitive.

But she has drawn a conclusion from it that the room has never drawn and would deny under oath: that the settling means the asking is out of place. What it actually means is that eleven years is a long time and hope is tiring and a room protects itself. That is a fact about people, and there is no verdict on her inside it.

You are not out of place in that room. Nothing about a congregation bracing has ever been God's ruling on your asking. I am not saying it to make a woman feel better about being awkward. Scripture says men ought always to pray, and not to faint (Luke 18:1), which is the stated purpose of a parable about somebody who kept asking past the point where it was comfortable, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it hold in a woman in those two seconds.

The purpose is stated before the story

Here is the part that turned this for me, and it takes nothing off one person in that room.

Read the unusual thing Luke does, because he tells you what the parable is for before he tells you the parable.

And he spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint.Luke 18:1

To this end. He removes the ambiguity in advance. The whole point of what follows is persistence, and specifically persistence past the moment where a reasonable person would stop.

And not to faint. That word covers exactly her fear: not that she would fall into sin, but that she would run out, go quiet, become a woman who used to ask. The verse treats the risk of stopping as the danger worth naming.

You are doing the thing the parable was told to produce, and Scripture states that purpose before the story rather than after it. That is written into the verse itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings it to a woman who can feel a room settle.

Nobody in that room is being blamed

Something must be said very plainly, or this becomes a page about a congregation that lost its nerve.

They did not fail. They asked, many of them, for years, and they carried disappointment that she did not have to carry because they were older and closer to it, and going quiet after eleven years is not cowardice. It is what tiredness looks like in decent people.

And nothing here says she is more faithful than they are. She is not. She is one woman with a particular constitution, doing what she can do, and several of them are doing things she could not manage for a week.

You are asking for this again, here. The fire that stayed is the one you want, not the one you remember. Scripture says how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him (Luke 11:13), where the asking is what is named and the temperature of the room is not a condition, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not the reaction of forty people, who receives what is asked.

And if these eleven years have cost more than the women in that room know, if sleep has gone, if Sunday has started to frighten you, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.