Praying Past Tonight

The supper is on the table and she has been praying since she sat down, and not one word of it has been about the table.

She is praying about eleven o'clock tomorrow morning. She has been praying about eleven o'clock tomorrow morning since about four this afternoon, on and off, in the gaps, while draining the pot and while reaching past somebody for the salt, and she is still at it now with a fork in her hand. Lord, go before me. Lord, let it go well. Lord, let them be reasonable. Lord, You know what this means. Lord, go before me.

There is nothing wrong with any of that, and I want to say so at the top so you do not brace for a telling off. She is doing what a person who believes God is listening does with a thing that frightens her. She is taking it to Him, over and over, in a kitchen, with her family around her. That is not a failure of anything.

Here is the whole problem, and it is a smaller and sadder thing than a failure. She is not going to receive this supper.

Look at what is actually in front of her while she prays. There is a pot on the stove with the lid off. There is a jug in the middle of the table that her mother had. Her son is telling a story with both hands and has knocked the salt over doing it and has not noticed. Her daughter has that face on that she gets when she is about to say something funny and is waiting for the right half second. Somebody has put a chair in at the corner for the neighbor's boy, who is eating with them again, and who eats like a man who has been at work.

And she is at the end of the table, present in the way you are present in a photograph, moving food from one side of the plate to the other, praying with real faith about a room she will be standing in at eleven o'clock tomorrow.

Her son says something to her twice. She catches it the second time and answers half a beat late, and he goes on with the story, because he is fifteen and it is not a wound, it is just a beat.

In about forty minutes the plates will go in the sink and the neighbor's boy will go home and the kitchen will be quiet, and if you asked her what happened at supper she would not be able to tell you one thing. She will have prayed for an hour, honestly, faithfully, with her whole heart. And the hour itself, the pot and the jug and the salt and the story with both hands, will have gone by without anybody receiving it, including her.

Maybe you are reading this at your own table with the evening running through your fingers the same way, praying past tonight toward some morning that has not arrived, and quietly certain that you cannot do otherwise while that morning is out there.

He put a day inside the prayer

When Jesus taught people to pray, He gave them a line about bread, and there is a word in the middle of it that most of us have said ten thousand times without hearing.

Give us this day our daily bread.Matthew 6:11

This day. He could have taught them to ask for provision in general, for the week, for the season, for whatever is coming. He put a day in it, and then He put the day in twice, this day and daily, as though the smallness of the unit were the point rather than a limitation He was apologizing for.

And here is why that is good news at your table rather than a rule about your prayer life. He is not telling you to stop asking about tomorrow. He is handing you today. He is saying that the bread of this particular evening, the pot with the lid off and the jug and the story with both hands, is on the list of things God gives, and that it is being given now, and that it is yours to receive tonight rather than to think about later when the eleven o'clock has been survived.

You are being handed this day, and He named it in the prayer Himself so that you would know it was on offer. Matthew 6:11 says give us this day our daily bread in His own teaching, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a line a woman has said since she was six years old and puts it down beside the actual supper in front of her, tonight, while it is still warm.

And I want to say the kind thing about the praying, because you have probably been made to feel foolish about it before. Praying about tomorrow is not faithlessness. It is love with nowhere to put itself yet. You are carrying something that has not happened, and you are carrying it to the right Person. Nobody is taking that off you and nobody is grading it.

You were never scolded by Him for praying ahead, and the prayer you have been praying all afternoon was heard the first time. It is written that your Father knows what you need before you ask, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that a relief instead of a rebuke, so that the hundredth asking is love and not a fee you have been paying to be heard.

According to your eating

Now the older picture, because this arrangement is not new and God has done it this way with a whole nation for forty years.

And they gathered it every morning, every man according to his eating: and when the sun waxed hot, it melted.Exodus 16:21

Every morning. According to his eating. That is a supply measured to a day and to a person, given in the amount that person actually eats, and it came down like that every single morning for four decades in a place where nothing grows.

Notice what it was not. It was not a storehouse. Nobody in that camp was ever given the year in one delivery so they could stop paying attention. And notice what that means about the God who ran it: He was not being stingy with them. He was arranging to meet them every morning. A day at a time is not a small supply. It is a near one.

You are living on a supply that comes down daily, and that arrangement is a nearness rather than a shortage. Exodus 16:21 says they gathered it every morning according to their eating, and the Holy Spirit is the One who carries a forty year pattern out of a desert and into a kitchen where somebody has been trying to gather tomorrow's portion tonight.

And this is why you cannot get the good of tomorrow by praying harder at supper. Tomorrow's bread is not out yet. It is not being withheld from you and you are not failing to reach it. It comes down in the morning, on the morning, when the morning gets here. What is out on the ground right now, warm, in front of you, is tonight's, and it is portioned according to your eating, and it is yours, and it will not keep.

You have tonight's portion in front of you right now, and it was measured out for you rather than left over from somebody else's day. It is written that each one gathered according to his eating, and the Spirit is the One who makes that an actual plate at an actual table instead of a fine thought about manna.