She noticed it in the middle of a sentence and could not finish it.
She was praying about a friend, the way she does, walking around the kitchen, and she heard the shape of her own request: Lord, send her something. Send her help. Send somebody. Send the right person, the right letter, the right word at the right moment.
And then, quite suddenly: I have never once asked You to come.
Not about her friend. Not about herself either. She went back through it in her head, twenty years of praying, and found the same verb everywhere. Send. Provide. Give. Do. All of them lovely, all of them scriptural, and all of them with the same shape, which is a shape that keeps the sender at a distance and expects a parcel at the door.
She has not told anybody, because it sounds like the sort of insight people are pleased with themselves about, and she is not pleased with herself. She is standing in a kitchen wondering what twenty years of asking for deliveries has quietly taught her about what she thinks God is like.
If your praying is all send, come and sit down. Twenty years of asking is not going to be filed as a mistake here.
Send is a good word and it is not the only one
Let us be careful here, because there is nothing wrong with the verb.
Scripture is full of send. Send out laborers. Send the rain. Send thy light and thy truth. Asking God to send is not a lesser prayer, and twenty years of it is not twenty years wasted, and I would not have you leave this kitchen suspicious of your own history.
What happened is subtler than an error. A verb repeated for decades quietly shapes a picture, and the picture that grew in you is of a God who dispatches. Generous, capable, and at a distance.
You are not being corrected for how you have prayed. Nothing about that verb has ever put God further off than He is. I am not saying that to be gentle with you. The written word says the LORD is nigh unto all them that call upon him (Psalm 145:18), which is a statement about where He already stands rather than about what He can be persuaded to dispatch, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not the sentence, who makes it live in a woman walking around a kitchen.
What He said He would do instead
Here is what changed this for me, and it is not a new way of phrasing a request.
Jesus is with His friends on the last night, and He is telling them what happens next, and what He says is the exact opposite of a dispatch.
I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you.John 14:18
He does not say I will send comfort. The word behind comfortless is orphans, and what He offers instead of a parcel is Himself arriving. A few verses later He says that He and the Father will come and make their abode with a person, which is the language of moving in rather than delivering.
Go through the whole book and it runs the same way. Rain came down on hard ground and bread on a wilderness floor, and then the sky opened over a river and the Spirit came down, and the sky opened over Bethlehem and the Son came down. The traffic moves steadily from parcels toward a Person.
You have been offered His arrival rather than His dispatch, and the Word puts it in exactly those words. That is written down as a promise on the worst night any of them ever had, and the Holy Spirit is what drives it home in a woman who has just heard her own verb.
Do not throw away the sending
Something must be said before you overcorrect, because by Thursday you will feel wrong asking God for anything practical again.
Ask Him to send. Keep asking. Your friend needs the letter and the person and the word at the right moment, and none of that becomes less real for being a delivery.
You have permission for both, and the Word never once made a person choose between a gift and the Giver. Scripture says how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him (Luke 11:13), where the very best thing on offer turns out to be a Person and not a package, and the Holy Spirit is the one that has carried twenty years of your sending prayers without ever calling them small.
And if this last while has cost more than anybody around you knows, if sleep has gone, if the evenings have started to frighten, 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.
Here is the turn, then, and it is not a promise about your friend, because I have not been given one and I will not invent one.
God Himself is what comes down over your life, and He arrives in person. You are not waiting on a delivery, you are receiving the One who sends it. The written word says the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (John 1:14), and dwelt is the word for pitching a tent where people actually live, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that true in your actual kitchen rather than in general.
I cannot tell you what God does about the thing you have been asking Him to send, or when. Nobody honest can. What I can tell you is that twenty years of send were twenty years of being heard, and that He never once treated a request for a parcel as a reason to stay away.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, in your own voice. The standing to speak like this is yours in Christ, and it was never issued on the strength of how well you have chosen your verbs. Scripture is the ground under it, the Holy Spirit is what makes it living rather than merely tidy, and what God sends or does, and when, is His, however He answers, and nothing on this page pretends to know.
- Habit of asking God to send, you are a way of praying and you are not the shape of how He answers. John 14 has Him saying I will not leave you comfortless, I will come to you, and the Holy Spirit made that a promise about arriving rather than dispatching. In the name of Jesus I stop treating you as the only verb.
- Picture I built of a God who is generous at a distance, you were never spoken over me by God, and you are not standing in this kitchen tomorrow. Psalm 145 says the Lord is nigh unto all who call on Him, which is about where He already stands, and His Spirit has been in this room for all twenty years. I am asking Him to come today, in those words.
- Father, You were made flesh and pitched Your tent where people actually live, and John 1 says we beheld Your glory. I thank You that Your Spirit carried twenty years of my sending prayers without ever calling them small, and that Luke 11 makes the best thing on offer a Person. Here is what I want, out loud, and here is Your name after it.
John 14:18
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